Data Center Dustup Favors Cisco

Cisco Systems stirred up a hornet's nest among server vendors with the announcement that it was explicitly getting into the blade-based server market.

They were right to do so, according to most analysts, but not because Cisco's server architecture-which began life as an a motherboard add-in to a dedicated router-could be a credible competitor to IBM, Hewlett-Packard or other server giants.

Cisco announced a server based on what it calls a Unified Computing System -- a rack-mounted system that includes units that can support up to eight blade servers based on Intel's next-generation Nehalen processors, a set of low-latency 10Gbit/sec Ethernet and FCoE switches and dedicated interface units called Fabric Extenders that provide up to four 10Gbit/Sec links between blade modules and the network backplane.

In a typical setup, the blades would act as host for virtual machines running on either VMware's ESX or Microsoft Corp.'s Hyper-V, both of which partnered with Cisco for the integration. To connect VMs to the network, they would also run Cisco's software-only Nexus virtual-switch software to provide high-speed dedicated access to both data and storage networks.

Each blade-server chassis comes with two 10 Gbit/sec connections and support for Ethernet, Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet and iSCSI, so they can connect to storage and data networks running a variety of protocols.

The setup is powerful, but there are too many companies selling blade-server products at too high a level of quality for Cisco to compete just as a server vendor, analysts said.

The disruptive element in the mix, however, may not be just a new brand on the blade, or even how closely the blade server is connected to both data and storage networks, according to Rich Ptak, president of Ptak, Noel & Associates. It may be the addition of BMC Software's BladeLogic server-management software and its sophisticated ability to provision, manage and monitor all the resources a virtual machine uses.

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