Data Center Dustup Favors Cisco

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March 23, 2009, 08:51 AM —  CIO.com — 

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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Sidekick: The Good News & the Bad News
Either way you look at it Microsoft Data Center management did not follow standards or best practices in this failure. In which case it makes me wonder more about the outsourcing of corporate data much less personal data.
- mburton325

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