Cisco: Networking stud goes for the brass ring

Company: Cisco Unified Computing System 5-2 Networking stud goes for the brass ring with new products, partnershipsCisco shook up the data center world in February when it announced its vision of a fully automated, consolidated and virtualized next-generation data center. Core to this pre-integrated platform are Cisco’s new homegrown blade servers, based on Intel’s next-gen Nehalem multicore processors.

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Each blade server uses network adapters for access to the system’s unified fabric, built using lossless, 10Gbps Ethernet and Fibre Channel over Ethernet interconnect switches. A blade chassis supports as many as eight blade servers and two fabric extenders, providing up to four 10G connections each between blade servers and the fabric interconnect. UCS Manager, embedded management software, integrates system components and provides centralized management.

“UCS is really all about virtualization, consolidation and automation,” says Soni Jiandani, vice president of marketing for Cisco’s Server Access and Virtualization Group. And standardization, she adds.

A company can’t virtualize until it consolidates and it can’t automate until it has virtualized, so it needs a foundational compute infrastructure that’s virtualized throughout and is based on standards, she adds.

“We believe that with consolidation comes capex and opex reductions. But without embedded virtualization and management capabilities, is a half-fulfilled promise,” Jiandani says. “The ultimate promise is that the customer should be given the ability to integrate technologies already deployed without disrupting what they have in place, in terms of operational model and technology investments in systems management, networking, applications, hypervisors and operating system.”

Hence, she says, Cisco developed the UCS to integrate with the technologies offered by a slew of ecosystem partners, including BMC Software, Intel, Microsoft, NetApp, Oracle and VMware. Industry watchers consider the management partnership with BMC particularly important.

With BMC management tools, Cisco gains the ability to provision, configure and manage the UCS in an integrated way. BMC BladeLogic, integrated with the UCS Manager software, will enable automated provisioning and configuration of the system resources.

Cisco’s move into blade servers may upset HP and IBM, but it’s a logical move, according to Zeus Kerravala, a senior vice president at Yankee Group Research. “As the coupling of compute and networking come together, Cisco needs to change its partnerships and look to applications and even storage to some extent. The Cisco-EMC-Oracle ecosystem is the thing that will be as important to Cisco over the next 10 years as HP and IBM were the last 10 years.”

The race to the next-generation data center is only just started, so calling a winner is difficult, analysts say. But nobody is counting out Cisco, especially if it continues fine-tuning how it will orchestrate among resources in the tightly integrated, standards-based UCS.

And, it does have a ton of customer loyalty going in its favor. Kerravala says, “Five years from now, I wouldn’t count Cisco out, not with that installed base in networking.”