Cisco aims to dominate the data centre market

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 17 March 2009 00:08

IT Industry - Market

Cisco is aiming to take a lead role in the data centre market with the launch of the Cisco Unified Computing Architecture that includes blade servers developed in partnership with Intel and partnerships with other key players: BMC Software, EMC, Emulex, Microsoft, NetApp, Novell, Oracle, QLogic, Red Hat and VMware that in some cases extend well beyond technical integration to provide services and end-to-end support for the new Unified Computing Architecture.

Cisco claims that its approach, "unites compute, network, storage access and virtualisation into a scalable, modular architecture that is managed as a single system," an architecture that "bridges the silos in the data centre into one unified architecture using industry standard technologies."

It promises that its next generation data centres will "unleash the full power of virtualisation by uniting compute, network, storage access, and virtualisation resources into a single energy efficient system that can reduce IT infrastructure costs and complexity, help extend capital assets and improve business agility well into the future."

Cisco claims that its Unified Computing System can reduce capex by up to 20 percent and opex by up to 30 percent, enable the provision of applications in minutes instead of days and shift the focus from IT maintenance to IT innovation. The system and associated services will be generally available to customers starting in the second quarter of 2009.

Writing on the company's blog, Cisco executive Elizabeth McNichols said: "Many reports have positioned today's announcement as a blade server launch, and while there is a compute element to Cisco's Unified Computing System, it is much more than that...Cisco's focus today is on market transitions, market expansion, world-class partnerships and innovation. It is not on a single product, and it's not on entering an already crowded market with a 'me too' product. We believe that there is an opportunity to provide unique, specialised solutions in the data centre that are different in form, customer benefits and business model than the current computing environment."

Cisco launches blade servers
Key elements of the Cisco Unified Computing System include:
- A new class of computing system designed by Cisco which incorporates the new Cisco UCS B-Series blades based on the future Intel Nehalem processor families (the next generation Intel Xeon processor). The Cisco blades are claimed to offer patented extended memory technology to support applications with large data sets and allow significantly more virtual machines per server.

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