Cisco's UCS: The industry reacts

March 24, 2009 -- The IT world has had about a week to digest, mull and question the ins-and-outs of Cisco's newly announced "game-changer," the Unified Computing System. And the industry certainly has questions for Cisco.

Several competitors are questioning whether Cisco's UCS – the platform that combines compute, network, storage access, and virtualization resources in a single system based on a new line of blade servers developed by Cisco – features a truly open architecture.

Brocade's CEO Mike Klayko made his opinion known yesterday in a video posted to the Brocade YouTube Channel.

Klayko does not believe large enterprise customers will put mission critical applications on a version one product, referring to Cisco's new blade servers.

Brocade has also issued an official statement to the media in response to Cisco's UCS launch. It reads:

"A dynamic and virtualized data center holds the promise of many compelling benefits for end-users including increased server utilization, decrease in power footprint and more efficient operations in general. However, achieving this goal is a complex challenge that can be best tackled by a broad ecosystem of industry partners and not based on a proprietary, singular architecture of one company.

In contrast, Brocade is already helping customers address these challenges by integrating our networking solutions with a range of mature computing, management and storage technologies from some of the strongest companies in the world. These partnerships are leveraging open interfaces/standards, co-developed technology, and products that are available today, which will lower costs and maximize return on investment for customers."

BLADE Network Technologies president and CEO Vikram Mehta also took aim at Cisco in a recent blog entry where he lists 10 reasons why Cisco's Unified Computing strategy is nothing more than a way to lock customers into a proprietary world while locking out vendors like HP and IBM.

Cisco begs to differ. Rob Lloyd, executive vice president designate, Worldwide Operations for Cisco, explained that Cisco has "built an open ecosystem of industry leaders" in support of the UCS even going as far as to refer to UCS supporters as a "dream team of capable partners."

Cisco is collaborating with a wide range of hardware and software vendors to develop systems and applications that work with the platform. Specifically, Cisco is teaming up with technology partners BMC Software, EMC, Emulex, Intel, Microsoft, NetApp, Novell, Oracle, QLogic, Red Hat, and VMware and has expanded strategic relationships with Accenture, CSC, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), and Wipro.

Noticeably absent from the partner list are the server vendors. However, Lloyd told media and analysts in last week's UCS conference call that Cisco does not view the UCS as a blade server.

"The UCS will be shipped and configured as a system. That's why we don't think we're competing on a blade platform, but on a new system form factor," he said.

Is 2009 the year of unified fabrics?

Tight budgets invite tough decisions. Some storage projects will undoubtedly be shelved this year as end users look to drive cost out of the data center. As a part of those consolidation efforts, network fabrics could get a makeover.

Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) analyst Bob Laliberte believes all organizations are in uncharted economic territory and 2009 will clearly be a challenging year for IT budgets.

However, according to his research, the majority of organizations surveyed by ESG expect that their storage spending will increase slightly in 2009.

ESG estimates that storage capital spending will grow at a modest rate of 2.9% from 2008 to 2009, outpacing most expectations of overall IT spending growth. Spending increases will be centered among the largest, most data-intensive organizations and will be tied to specific business initiatives such as Web 2.0 projects, improved business intelligence, and globalization.

If the main players in the push for unified networking technologies are to be believed, the economic climate creates a big opportunity for unified networking technologies. Both Brocade and Cisco say they are seeing success with their newest products as users are well on their way to adopting the core platforms necessary for supporting the unified fabrics of the future.

"Our DCX Backbone is the fastest ramping and most widely successful product line we've ever had," said Brocade's senior director of product marketing, Marty Lans.

Though Brocade doesn't break out specific numbers for public consumption, the company cites internal metrics and general market acceptance as the measure of success for the DCX. The company bases its claims on the number of units shipped and port density.

Cisco is also enjoying success as it positions the capabilities of its Nexus platform as necessary for virtual data centers.

"The implementation of a unified fabric infrastructure allows for combining storage and data traffic on a single, unified Ethernet network. As virtualization becomes a stronger design influence in the data center, these features become a requirement to support virtual environments," said Cisco's Dante Malagrino, director of product marketing for data center emerging technology.

Cisco touts more than 250 customers for its new flagship product, the Nexus 7000, which began shipping in January of 2008.

According to Laliberte, server virtualization is also driving the need for faster, more advanced storage networking technologies.

"Our research indicates that all networked storage is increasing, Fibre Channel SAN, iSCSI SAN and NAS. With multiple virtual machines there is a need for additional throughput," he said.

Laliberte thinks the concept of consolidated fabrics will continue to gain acceptance this year.

"As long as organizations continue to consolidate data centers and infrastructure – the ability to consolidate FC directors onto a backbone should resonate – saves on power, cooling and space and the new virtual fabric technology ensures secure segmentation of the SAN," he said.