A snapshot from EMC’s Global Marketing CTO:
It's amazing what can be done with a clear vision, a clean sheet of paper and a serious R+D budget, no?
Cisco doesn't have the decades-long legacy of historical server architectures and traditional operating systems holding it back.
Think about it.
No HP-UX and Itanium (Itanic?) base to feverishly defend.
No Solaris/SPARC business to position.
And please don't get me started about IBM's plethora of different architectures.
Cisco had the freedom and the insight to design for what will be -- and not what was.
Cisco also had the freedom to invest in what really mattered -- an entirely modern computing architecture -- and to partner freely with the rest of the industry for the technologies and competencies to complete the customer offering.
Something the traditional server guys just weren't able to do.
On a practical note, it'll take a while for all the UCS components to mature and prove themselves. It'll also take a while for data center architects to fully appreciate what Cisco has done here.
See the full post for more details.
My $.02 for now:
While I sense it’d take some investigative reporting to understand some details, e.g., on when Cisco will lead with EMC/VMware virtualization versus Microsoft virtualization, it’s clear Cisco’s entry into the server market is likely to be very bad news for some already-struggling competitors, e.g., Sun.
I have a hunch we’ll be reading a lot about expanding competition between Cisco/EMC/Microsoft and HP/Oracle over the next few months. While the HP/Oracle partnership seems to have largely fallen off the press/blogosphere radar since Oracle Open World 2008 (last September), I suspect it’s still going to become a data center game-changer.
Chuck's Blog: Brave New Thinking From Cisco
