Data Center Diversity Drives IT Agendas

For the final chapter in Network Computing's five-part examination of Cisco's role in-- and the implications for--changes transforming the data center, we take a closer look at these changes and what they may mean for the near future. The first key to understanding this brave new world is the private cloud and IT as a service, says analyst David Hill, principal, Mesabi Group.

"That changes the whole way of looking at the situation, as the end goal is a transformed IT infrastructure that is cost-efficient, more responsive to changing business needs (agility) and embodies greater disciplines (that is, higher and more quantifiable service levels)," says Hill. "That means that not only Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM and Oracle are the major vendors, but EMC, VMware and NetApp also are key players. [Also important are] companies ranging from single-product companies that fill in key gaps (which is why so many get acquired) to multiple product/service companies that cover selected key areas but do not have the breadth of the larger companies, such as Microsoft."

Network Computing Special Report: How Cisco Is Changing The Datacenter
Part 1 - Throwing Bandwidth At Your Network Problems Isn't Enough
Part 2 - Cisco Faces Uphill Battle Selling Data Center Servers
Part 3 - Lots of Changes, But Top Storage Vendor Lineup To Remain Intact
Part 4 - Data Centers: Who's On First?

The "information utility" concept has been around since at least 1986, but the current attempt is wisely considered to be a journey and no one has completed the journey, states Hill. "The question is whether there will ever be a final destination, or are companies on an endless voyage where progress can be made step by step but no company can say that it has completed the journey, even for a time. The jury is still out on that."

Stuart Miniman, senior analyst, the Wikibon Project, says that while every vendor has been proclaiming its vision of what the data center of the future looks like, it is only recently that he has been able to discern some differentiation between the actual products. "Cisco was first with the new vision with Data Center 3.0. It has taken a couple of years, but Cisco is delivering on a lot of what it promised. The challenge for Cisco is that it has such a large installed base and broad portfolio that customers can easily be confused how to get from today's environment to tomorrow's promise. Juniper is reinvigorated with its new vision and product, Qfabric."

Charles King, principal analyst, Pund-IT Research, says there's a certain amount of hype involved with the various vendors' data center aspirations, which means customers need to proceed with at least a modicum of "caveat emptor." "That said, each company's offering tends to emphasize its individual strengths, so while there's some chest beating going on, most know what they're talking about, so far as their own solutions go, anyway. Plus, since these strategies will significantly influence how each vendor takes cloud computing to market, customers are advised to pay attention."One upshot of the new market is that many of the big vendors have been filling out their product and service portfolios as they try and become more of an end-to-end, single-source data center powerhouse. So Cisco moves into the server market while former server partners HP and IBM buy (such as with HP's 3Com acquisition) or partner with (IBM and Juniper) alternative networking suppliers.

For the last decade, the networking space has been defined by Cisco, says Miniman. "For years, the competition was highly fragmented and lacked the army of supporters (Cisco's army of CCIEs and CCNAs) or the partnerships (Cisco has a very strong distribution channel and lots of partnerships)."

Things are changing rapidly in the networking marketplace now, he says. The combination of the transition to 10Gigabit Ethernet (and higher) speeds, along with the density of compute infrastructure and the increase in usage of embedded switching is putting increased competitive pressure on Cisco at the edge of the network.

"Cisco is well aware of this trend, and the launch of the Cisco UCS is not only an entry into the server market but also a way for Cisco to keep market share at the edge. HP (Procurve and Virtual Connect) and IBM (BNT acquisition) both have offerings that are both baked into blade server offerings and into top-of-rack environments; Cisco is likely to lose share in the edge/embedded."

Miniman says core networking is also going through a transition due to virtualization and cloud computing trends. "Cisco's transition from the very popular Catalyst product line to the newer Nexus product line offers competition and opportunity to try and win business." There has been consolidation in the players that are competing with Cisco for the core switches. "In the past, the 'other' vendors fought to be a second source to Cisco, fighting over the market share scraps, but recently, HP and Juniper have been gaining share and other players like Arista have carved out niches (in Arista's case in the HPC market)."Back to the future--the '"ood old days" when IBM and the long-gone Wild BUNCH (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data and Honeywell) ruled the data center roost as all-in-one vendors-- is not likely to happen, says Hill. "The transformed data center may not have as many software and hardware vendors as now, but I suspect that heterogeneity will still have a place in the future. The reason is, within a large enterprise there may be more than one use case for any particular technology--say, server virtualization where VMware might play in the more complex parts of the environment but Microsoft might play in selected other areas. That means that the different companies' technologies are going to have to play nicely with each other. The competitive jockeying will be fierce, but the days of we-are-an-all-vendor-Company-X IT organization are not likely to return."

King adds he doesn't hear many IT customers longing for the good old days of being locked into proprietary systems. "But as enterprise IT becomes increasingly complex (particularly if cloud catches on the way that many hope), vertically integrated solutions may deliver greater value than the cobbled-together systems common in so many data centers."

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