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Well, the June 12th Channel Register report on Cisco UCS prices certainly changes the conclusions of the original Cisco price comparison done in April. For Blades, assuming the “Legacy” Blade Price used by Cisco in the original comparison is the actual List Price of a “Legacy” Nehalem Blade (Cisco agreed that HP was the “Legacy” system, so for this analysis I use an HP BL 460c G6), I was able to configure a “Legacy” Blade and come up with a list price close to the price in the original Cisco comparison. The configuration is two Intel Nehalem 2.53Ghz processors with 32Gb of “slow” memory and a 73GB SAS 15k Hard Disk. Then using the prices in the Register article, I configured a Cisco Blade with equivalent configuration. In the comparison of Blade prices, Cisco originally used a price of $5665 per blade compared against the “Legacy” Blade at $5732. BUT, using that configuration with the Register-reported prices, the comparison is $9497 for Cisco and $5732 for the “Legacy” Blade. Another takeaway from the Register-reported prices is the Cisco Interconnect Extender. The Register quotes $3749 EACH – not for two as quoted by Cisco. These two items – though mainly the Blade prices – changes the results of the 8-Blade comparisons with the Cisco UCS being 48% MORE expensive rather than the reported 13% lower cost. These items roll into the 320-Blade comparison as well – changing the results for that comparison, which now shows the Cisco UCS solution being 13% MORE expensive rather than the estimated 31% cheaper as quoted in the original comparison. Now, I’ve seen some responses claiming discounts will affect “actual” prices, but that’s not relevant to the point of an “apples to apples" comparison.