Cisco’s networking rivals sounded a familiar refrain when reacting to the company’s Unified Computing System launch: caveat emptor. Juniper likes the vision but dislikes the embodiment.
“Rather than keeping the components – servers, storage, networking, management – all with their own ecosystems and being individually improved by the various vendors, Cisco chose a proprietary way to integrate these things together,” says David Yen, executive vice president and general manager of Juniper’s data center business group. “It deprives (customers) the ability to take advantage of the constant evolution and advancement in the server area, or the storage area, or in other software areas. The more you integrate, the more you tend to specialize.”
Juniper’s alternative approach is Project Stratus, which relies heavily on partnerships but is currently very light on detail.
HP ProCurve says Cisco’s UCS launch is a validation of HP’s own data center strategy of tightly coupling server, switching and management.
“It’s quite a compliment,” says Matt Zanner, worldwide director of data center solutions for HP ProCurve. “We’re hitting the ground running and excited to do so.”
Blade Network Technologies, which makes switches for HP and IBM blade servers, says Cisco’s approach puts integration and interoperability with existing data center installations at risk.
“According to Cisco, converged data and storage networking requires…a sole-source Cisco-only serverand network,” writes Blade CEO Vikram Mehta in his blog.
