IHS Global Insight Perspective | |
Significance | Cisco has launched a new server product that will round out its portfolio of products for the data centre. |
Implications | Cisco will be competing with former partners but aims to offer advantages by consolidating the data-centre systems and offering strong virtualisation capabilities. |
Outlook | The market for "mega data centres" may be a beneficiary of cautious spending on IT infrastructure through the recession as it provides flexible computing capacity without capital expenditure. |
Cisco announced this week that it is rounding out its product portfolio for data centres and entering the server market by creating a "Unified Computing System", which it describes as uniting "compute, network, storage access and virtualization resources in a single energy efficient system". The system is based on industry standards, has integrated management features, and uses a "wire once" unified fabric. The design claims to reduce capital expenditure by 20% and operational expenditures by 30%, including greater energy efficiency and cooling costs—helped by the 50% reduction in components and cabling. It offers faster applications provision with less maintenance time, enhanced scalability, and single-system management.
The computing system is based on Cisco's new UCS B-Series Blades using Intel Nehalem Xeon Processors, the first of which were released only in November 2008 with server chips not due until later in 2009. The unified fabric is connected using 10 Gbps Ethernet as a foundation that allows local, storage, and high-performance computing networks to be consolidated, helping to cut components and cabling. Storage can also be accessed over fibre channel, fibre channel over Ethernet, or iSCSI, facilitating backwards compatibility. Virtualisation allows the creation of virtual machines with specific security, policy enforcement, and diagnostics features. Mario Mazzola, senior vice-president of Cisco's Server Access and Virtualization Business Unit, noted that "The virtual machine has become the new atomic building block of the data centre, creating new challenges and opportunities with the potential to transform the computing environment and deliver significant benefits." Virtualisation allows the creation of hundreds of virtual servers within a single machine, enabling greater system flexibility.
Partners
The Unified Computing System launched with an "open partner ecosystem" that includes technology partners, business consulting and system integration partners, and channel partners. Collaborative and development relationships have been formed with BMC Software, EMC, Emulex, Intel, Microsoft, NetApp, Novell, Oracle, QLogic, Red Hat, and VMware. The relationships with BMC, EMC, Microsoft, and VMWare are noted to extend to providing end-to-end support as well as technical integration. BMC is providing its service management solution, which facilitates rapid configuration and resource allocation and integration with additional BMC solutions, enabling customisation and insight. VMware provides the virtualisation platform under an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreement. EMC's portfolio of IT management solutions will be tested, developed, and integrated with the platform. Red Hat will provide enterprise Linux operating system for the system, either as a standalone or guest operating system on virtual servers.
Key business consulting and global systems integration partners include Accenture, CSC, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), and Wipro (see World: 25 February 2009: Cisco and Accenture Strengthen Partnership). The Accenture partnership currently has four core solutions based on the Unified Computing System: data-centre consolidation; enterprise applications particularly for enterprise resource planning applications; advanced, memory-intensive computing, particularly targeting scientific, financial, retail, public-service, and industrial organisations running custom, industry-specific, transactional intensive applications; and infrastructure-as-a-service, particularly on-demand "cloud" computing capabilities provided by service providers.
Services
Cisco also launched a range of services to support the hardware, with system architecture and design, planning and migration, optimisation, operations support, and remote management.
Outlook and Implications
The New York Times notes that this is Cisco's first move into the core server market and will compete with partners such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Dell, which have provided the servers for installations using Cisco networking equipment. Investment in data centres is a key plank of carriers' strategies as they attempt to create and capture the growing market for networked, on-demand computing services, making this a key moment to tap into the market (see World: 25 February 2008: AT&T Describes Plans for US$1-bil. Global Investment). As companies seek to rein in costs, outsourcing data-centre functions and tapping the flexibility available through service provider provisioning, this should be one of the early green shoots for IT and telecoms in an economic recovery. It has been noted by commentators, for example InfoWorld, that some partner companies, particularly BMC, may prove to be tempting acquisition targets for Cisco as it pushes further into the data-centre market.
Cisco may have some advantages over the traditional data-centre server competitors through the unified nature of the system design. The traditional competitors in the market are being joined by other potential competitors: for example, Juniper Networks, an up-and-coming key competitor with Cisco in the switch and router market, has noted that it, too, is focusing on products for the data centre. The "Stratus Project" is part of an R&D ramp-up that aims to develop a new data-centre fabric that can dynamically allocate resources including routing, security, storage appliances, and servers with flexibility and capability for scaling up to enable "mega data centres" and meet the demands of emergent cloud computing paradigms—a stratus being a flat, single-layer cloud (see World: 25 February 2009: Juniper Ups R&D Spending But Cuts Salaries in Flat Market).