How Cisco simultaneously plays nice – and not-so-nice – with HP
Cisco’s old attitude toward its competitors: “If we can’t see them, they aren’t there.” (Or maybe they were just taking the high road. Who knows?) Cisco’s new attitude toward its competitors: “I have met the enemy, and it is us.” Cisco finally started to get aggressive, and was naming names. And now, Cisco’s new new attitude toward its competitors: “Can’t we all just get along?” I was just getting used to Cisco’s hard line approach. And then they get all soft on me and collaborate with HP on the Nexus B22-HP fabric extender. Ok, I’m being a little dramatic here. The truth is, Cisco working with HP isn’t really new, and we knew this was coming. Cisco and HP know that few of us have true one-vendor solutions. And come on, this product is cool. How do you make distributed high speed architecture cool? Cut out the middle-man, or in this case, the middle-device. By now many are familiar with the Nexus 5000 and its almost octopus-like topology. Well, rather than having third party server blades connect to remote switches, which then in turn connect back to the parent Nexus 5000 switch, the B22 forwards all traffic to the parent Nexus 5000 switch directly. This connection is via eight 10gig Ethernet links. The flavor you need those connections in can vary based on need and distance such as, Copper Twinax, Fabric Extender Transceivers, or even standard SR and LR 10gig optics. The beauty of it (as if the above wasn’t cool enough) is the single point of policy enforcement and management. The Nexus 5000 is the brains behind the operation. On top of that reducing your cabling infrastructure needs and consolidating your technology footprint in the data center. So while it’s clear that the customer is benefitting from Cisco and HP collaboration, maybe now Cisco is just keeping “thy friends close, but thy enemies closer”?
