Beta tester Savvis talks up Cisco's UCS architecture

Service provider Savvis is one of the 10 organizations beta testing Cisco's Unified Computing System data center platform. CTO Bryan Doerr has had the box in Savvis labs for three weeks, but conversations with Cisco on its application began 18 or so months ago. Doerr took some time to share his thoughts on the UCS platform and next-generation data center architectures with Network World Managing Editor Jim Duffy.

Can you share your initial thoughts on the UCS platform?  

The basic capabilities they advertised, they're there. It continues to evolve in terms of the [user interface], the polish. The first [testing] steps are the interfaces; then we'll dive into scale testing, embedded functions, things built for virtualization -- the primary benefit of this box -- as opposed to being built physically and then virtualized.

But this is the culmination of a vision-sharing session that took place a couple of years ago. Cisco and Savvis realized we had very like visions.

How long will testing take before you make a deployment decision?

We're a good part of 2009 away from a purchase decision.

What other vendors' data center unification solutions are you evaluating?

One of the problems is we don't have that many choices. That's what the novelty is here. They've forced the industry to think of another evolutionary path for the server. We were having trouble motivating that original thought and revisiting the current mode. It's such a critical component of the data center and one [where] there's so much allegiance to a particular style of packaging and tool sets that introducing a brand-new change was going to be pretty difficult.

Cisco's UCS: A closer look.

At a high-level, what they've done is reintroduced the idea of the server and forced people to reckon with whether or not this style and subsequent need for virtualization capabilities are key to enabling a different style of service. We have to continue to look at that solution vs. traditional solutions. There are clearly advantages. Where this box has to come out and shine is in operational efficiencies; it has to drive cost down, [perform] data center consolidation in terms of fabric and network interfaces into a cost reduced connectivity strategy, [and derive] related skill savings in terms of people that run [storage-area networks] vs. people that run networks…all that segregation of skill and technology needs to produce operational benefit that we can quantify. That's what we're going to have to consider against entrenched solutions.

I intuitively believe that for service providers like Savvis to obtain the differentiation of service level that's going to [drive] a substantial move towards managed services; we're going to have to show a level of cost benefit, functional benefit, that most enterprises find out of reach. It's too easy to continue in the mode of buying and using the traditional approaches -- it's going to be when they see a cost benefit, a control benefit, a feature benefit that they can't obtain themselves at a comparable price point, that enterprises are going to re-envision how they deliver infrastructure. These whole system solutions are a piece of that story.