Key Points on ‘Cisco Blade Servers’ or Unified Computing
Sometimes we can’t get everything we want to say in a press release, like our recent Cisco Unified Computing announcement. This is a collection of a few points that seem to get lost in translation/distillation that we wanted to ensure were top-of-mind for anyone reading about our announcements today.
1) Cisco is creating a sub-category of the server market- a specialized market we call Unified Computing. This is not the ‘Clash of the Titans’ or us ‘coming after HP or IBM or Dell’. Some companies may choose to join us in this market, others may continue to operate the status quo. We are certain over time we will not be alone in this market.
2) Unified Computing is not going to be a single-vendor closed system for the entire data center. We are not advocating going and doing a forklift upgrade or rip/replace on existing data centers customers have. This specialization of the market will make sense for some workloads, there are others it will not be right for for some time.
3) This system is based on industry standard Processor architectures, Memory Architectures, Network Architectures, Storage Architectures, and Cabling Architectures. We avoided doing anything proprietary everywhere we could. Much of the innovation is in the integration and pre-engineering across a broad array of partners. Even the APIs used for management and provisioning were designed to co-exist and based on extensible semantics and open interfaces.
4) This is about more than Cisco. It’s about a community of partners, some of the top companies in their areas of expertise. It’s about our customers and their increasingly common unfulfilled requirements. It’s about how best to serve our customers and bring them innovations that control and reduce recurring costs, and stop the legacy practices that led to waste and inefficiency that we all experience today.
5) Virtualization made this Unified Computing market possible. It also made the test and qualification of 1000’s of applications (a traditional barrier to entry created by the incumbents to justifiably reduce customer risk) much less necessary than before. Virtualization also made the workloads portable, even across vendors, thus we fully expect to be happily inter-operating with other vendors in traditional server markets for many years in the future.
dg (Follow me this fun and fulfilling day on Twitter or Friendfeed)
Posted by Douglas Gourlay at 07:30AM PST
dejon97 Mar 16, 2009
Being a big fan of Cisco, I think Unified Computing is a great move. Virtualization is here to stay. More and more Fortune 500 companies are making it the linchpin of their data centers. Make it is to adopt virtualization and companies will beat a path to your door. Great job Cisco. Follow me @dejon97.