Cisco aims to dominate the data centre market

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 17 March 2009 00:08

IT Industry - Market

- a unified, low-latency, lossless, 10Gbps ethernet network architecture that consolidates what today are three separate networks: local area networks (LANs), storage area networks (SANs) and high performance computing networks. Cisco claims this will lower costs by reducing the number of network adapters, switches, and cables and by decreasing power and cooling requirements.

According to Cisco, support for a unified fabric means that the Unified Computing System can access storage over ethernet, fibre channel, fibre channel over ethernet or iSCSI, providing customers with choices and investment protection. [and] IT staff can pre-assign storage access policies for system connectivity to storage resources, simplifying storage connectivity and management, and helping to increase IT productivity."
- management of the entire system as a single entity through the Cisco UCS Manager which provides an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI), a command line interface (CLI), and an application programming interface (API) to manage all system configuration and operations.

- New services from Cisco ranging from architecture design, planning, and migration, to operations and remote management covering all aspects of data centre resources: people, processes, and technologies.

Cisco will initially take its Unified Computing System to market with a select group of Cisco Data Center Specialized channel partners that "already possess the networking, compute, virtualisation, storage and integrated services practices to help customers successfully make the transition to a Unified Computing architecture," and will enlist additional channel partners as customer demand accelerates. Cisco claims to have more than 250 specialised data centre channel partners around the world.

OEM partnership with VMware
Cisco has entered into an OEM agreement with VMware covering product engineering and integrated sales and support strategies for data centre virtualisation and unified computing. Cisco and VMware will collaborate on joint sales, joint channel programs, and marketing activities.