Cisco selling blades?

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Tuesday, December 16. 2008

Cisco seems to look for new markets - Cisco planning significant data center assault:

Perhaps the most important example of that will be a new Cisco blade server system expected next year. This will take the company into the data center compute space, right up against longtime stalwarts — and up to now, Cisco partners — IBM and HP.

This matches to rumours and hints i´ve got in in the last few weeks. But i don´t believe that Cisco will play a large role in this business. There are already several players in this game ... IBM,HP,Dell,FSC and Sun. And more important: People think of Cisco as the supplier of their networking equipment ... not of their servers ... and Cisco hasn´t a long track record as a supplier of servers. Cisco needs a real differentiator ... i´m curious what this differentiator might be ... but at the moment i´m not convinced about the success.

And there is another problem: Network admin departments, storage admin departments and server admin departments have seperated supplier spheres in many companies. And Cisco is a supplier for the network admin departments and they rarely connection to the server departments. And: Did you know Sun sold an hardware load balancer for a while? No? Cisco will have a similar problem ...

Posted by Joerg Moellenkamp in English, The IT Business at 10:46 | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0)

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The problem is not Cisco trying the data center market, that is attached to its net products. The problem would be Sun not entering in the Net market, taking advantage of that great solaris networking stuff that is just beginning to be released (Crossbow and next, in addition to FireEngine, GLDv3, Quagga, Clearview, VRRP....). That is, to exploit that high perform, open-source and commoditized networking !!

#1 Raul on 2008-12-16 15:37 (Reply)

Cisco had no market share on firewalls so they bought the pix-guys. They had no fc-switches, so they bought a company. SOHO-Network stuff? They bought Linksys and Kiss.

I think if Cisco really wants to sell server they will buy a brand and market share.

#2 Joern (Homepage) on 2008-12-16 19:36 (Reply)

It doesn't matter if HP. IBM or SUN-blades are better than what Cisco will come up with. There is a turf war going on in the data centre and the network guys are gaining ground. Too many network people have a narrow view of the data centre and their world view is completely shaped from what Cisco folks tell them. And they will probably sell them a story that Cisco blades integrate better with their network gear which also happens to be Cisco.

Look at SAN. There's an "N" in there. So a lot of places Cisco MDS is chosen, not out of technical merits(then it would be Brocade) but out of politics.

Next step to Cisco lock-in is FCoE. You think people will convert their network core to Brocade?

#3 lpar on 2008-12-17 00:14 (Reply)

FCoE or FC isn´t the point of my posting. The substitution of FC by FCoE or iSCSI is a logical development. As you stated correctly: Both are networks. The linespeed of Ethernet is beyond the linespeed of FC, thus it´s logical to consolidate to a single-media fabric.

We will see the usual suspects in this range. Force10, Extreme Networks, the Procurve line of HP ... and yeah ... to a large part Cisco. Brocade will loose some of it´s business.

But another thing: I don´t think that FCoE is anywhere ready for primetime. Let´s wait how this develops in the next two or three years.

Server are something completly different. And never underestimate the political barriers between networking administration and server administration. It´s correct ... many networking people are focused to cisco. But networking people don´t buy servers.

#3.1 Joerg M. (Homepage) on 2008-12-17 10:56 (Reply)

Cisco is extending in the data centre and in that respect FCoE is as relevant as Cisco server blades. Agree, I don't think FCoE will take off anytime soon, it is immature, too costly and I really don't see any benefits with it. You want to mix storage and IP-traffic, go with iSCSI.

If Cisco blade servers successfully will force itself into the data centre, we have to see. Cisco probably will buy itself into the business. Maybe they will buy SUN. The network is the computer, right?

#4 lpar on 2008-12-17 12:22 (Reply)

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