Later today Cisco will reveal one of the poorest-kept
secrets in industry history with the launch of its unified
computing strategy, which hinges on its new blade servers,
code-named California.
The launch is expected to shake up the industry in a big way,
according to analysts.
The California blade servers will come pre-configured, and
partners including business software specialists BMC and Microsoft
are expected to be on board. Virtualisation capabilities will come
courtesy of Cisco partner VMware.
Cisco chief technology officer
Padmasree Warrior said, "We see it as a major inflection point
in the datacentre, and companies benefiting from a common
architecture linking all datacentre resources together - what we
call unified computing.
"We see a market transition as a result of virtualisation.
Virtualisation architectures today are very much assembly-required
islands [and] silos where the burden of systems integration is on
the customer. This increases costs and deployment times while
decreasing efficiency," she said.
Warrior claimed Cisco had spotted an opportunity to cut out the
manual integration process in favour of a more integrated
architecture that would break down these silos.
Cisco has allied itself with the big server players such as
Hewlett-Packard and IBM many times in the past to provide the
networking components of end-to-end datacentre systems.
However, HP has recently redoubled its efforts around its own
networking division, ProCurve. By moving aggressively into the
server market, analysts believe Cisco will force massive change on
the relationship.
While Cisco's top brass remain fully paid-up converts to the
"co-opetition" mantra, it is unlikely that HP and IBM will ever see
their partnership with Cisco in quite the same way again.
A version of this story originally appeared on
MicroScope.co.uk