Cisco Responds to 'Unified Computing' Critics

Cisco raised a lot of hackles last month when it introduced a new vision for enterprise data centers, proposing a Unified Computing System that would treat servers, storage, and networking as a pool of virtual resources than can be dynamically allocated as needed to meet the constantly changing demands of business processes and applications. It also announced plans for a new series of blade server products that would put it into direct competition with existing partners such as Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and IBM.

It didn't take long for current and future competitors to criticize Cisco's plans, with HP and Brocade the first out of the gate. Other vendors, analysts, and users soon piled on with criticisms and questions and comments in briefings, in blog posts, and on the Byte and Switch message board.

Apparently, Cisco's feelings were hurt, and the networking giant responded Thursday with more details of its product plans and some cost figures, adding more fuel to a fire that's building over a product that isn't yet available. The company took aim and tried to counter the "top five myths" surrounding its UCS: It isn't new or innovative; it requires a forklift upgrade; it is expensive and doesn't scale; it will take control away from IT managers; and it is only good for VMware environments.

Cisco's main goal is to reduce the layers of complexity that exist in today's data centers, said Paul Durzan, director of the server access business unit at Cisco. By using standardized building blocks to build a data center infrastructure, IT departments can build an integrated cohesive system with a unified fabric for LANs and SANs and a management system that can treat everything as a single domain. He called that one of the "top innovations" of the system. Another innovation: "We use service profiles to abstract the hardware state from the blade itself and we can give the blade the identity and personality it should have. In the past that had to be done manually and now it can be automated," he said in an interview. Other innovations cited by Durzan included embedded management, a patented memory extension, scalable bandwidth, and a virtualization adapter.

Cisco also released a series of benchmarks showing that its systems rank at or near the top in most categories. "The point here is that we are standing toe to toe with HP, IBM, and Dell and bringing in a high-performance system to the market. We brought in a lot of people who have a lot of experience designing servers," he said.He also touted the virtualization adapter, which will be able to bypass the hypervisor and let virtual machines talk directly to the memory, and Cisco's memory extension technology. "You don't have to trade off capacity for speed or performance, and it can save on memory, licensing, and CPUs," he said.

Another key message is that Cisco will help data center managers save money. Durzan discussed a chart that showed a 320-blade system from a "top 3 server vendor" costing more than $1.5 million while a comparable Cisco Unified Computing system would only cost around $506,000. Customers can save 40 percent on capital expenditures, 19 percent on power and cooling over three years, 86 percent on cables, and 61 percent on racks, the company said. "The real advantage comes when you start to scale because we don't have to add in additional switches, adapters, chassis, or software licenses," Durzan said.

As for internal IT department politics, Cisco wants to be Switzerland and not take sides. Critics said Cisco's approach will force server, storage, and networking specialists into a single team and that many won't want to give up control of their systems for fear of losing their jobs. "Our systems are designed to let you maintain traditional boundaries and silos if you want. But we can help facilitate communications between groups and we can automate a lot of functions. It can sometimes take days for a server administrator to get a MAC address from a network administrator. This will let you automate that if you want," he said.

Internal IT department battles are one thing, competition among tech vendors is another. Cisco has helped to raise that rivalry to a new level by introducing a new approach to building unified and virtualized data centers and jumping into a market that belonged to its former partners, the server vendors. Cisco has its own supporting case of major vendors like EMC, VMware, and others, so it appears that lines are being drawn and sides are being chosen. The battlefield should become even more active once products are introduced.

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