Cisco Paves Way For A New Product Category With Unified Computing

As a part of its Data Centre 3.0 strategy, Cisco yesterday launched its much-awaited Project California – Unified Computing System in India. The official release by the company claimed that this new data centre architecture will bridge the silos in the data centre into a unified architecture using industry-standard technologies. This new computing approach adopted by Cisco is unique as it is for the first time that a company is selling a single, packaged offering for managing data centres.

Other major vendors like Sun Microsystems have earlier talked about such a unified, network-centric future. However, Cisco has an early mover advantage in converging storage, compute and networking into a single layer (thanks to virtualisation technologies) that is managed by a specialised piece of software.

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Although the networking giant has launched the architecture for UCS, the actual product and more details will be announced after 15 days, said Andre Smit, MD, Data Centre Sales, APAC, Cisco in the conference related to the above announcement. The product shipment is expected to start by June this year. Highlighting the market opportunities for this new product line, Smit said that the worldwide data centre market (which includes hardware, software, services and networking) could be aggregated to $85 billion out of which $20 billion could be addressed by UCS.

The company started developing the above products three years ago and has carefully planned the technology introduction timeline. Nexus 7000 (data centre Ethernet), Nexus 5000 (unified fabric), Nexus 1000 (VN link) and Nexus 2000 (fabric extended) are some of the products the company launched last year, which were basically aligned to the company’s move towards the vision of UCS. UCS components mainly include a UCS Manager for integrated, system-level physical device management; fabric interconnect and fabric extenders for 10 Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) with extension capabilities; blade servers and enclosures for energy efficiency; memory expansion for workloads; virtual adapters for virtual host bus adapters (HBAs); and network interface controller (NIC) adapters.

The company has announced an open ecosystem partnership to give further push to the product. Smit informed that Wipro and TCS have been selected as key system integration partners for its worldwide go-to-market strategy.

Impact on Dynamics of Server and Data Centre Market

With UCS, Cisco has also entered the blade server market, which has naturally raised several eyebrows in the industry. Smit claimed that this launch is not just about entering the blade server market, but it is also about creating a new market itself.

A recent paper launched by Gartner in repsonse to Cisco’s release mentions that with this move Cisco is differentiating itself in the systems market space, by offering a blade server and fabric interconnect as a single, integrated management domain. Cisco is attempting to use virtualisation to break up the traditional server architecture by recombining it with networking technologies.

With UCS, Cisco pits itself against HP, IBM and Dell. The UCS Manager is up against mature and established products like Systems Insight Manager and IBM Director, while the UCS fabric and blades are positioned against C-Class and H-Class blades.

Till now, Cisco has often partnered and shared space with HP and IBM. However, this is not first time that the company will be competing against these vendors. Smit explained, “There are certain areas where we will continue our partnership with these vendors, but there are specific areas like this, where we will aggressively compete.”

Naveen Mishra, senior research analyst, Gartner, told Biztech2 that as the product is based on blade server, it is going to be a challenging market for Cisco. The company might not be able to replace or win customers from any of the existing vendors. “In the short term, I don’t see any significant shift in the market place; however, from a long-term perspective if Cisco is able to position its product appropriately, we may see a certain kind of shift in the competitive landscape,” he said.

Cisco has been quite active in the data centre space in the past few years and this has given them some visibility and footprint in the data centre environment. Mishra felt that Cisco can really use this opportunity to extend their product portfolio into the systems market place. Cisco is betting that UCS’s technological differences will beat the competition, but Gartner believes that to displace an incumbent vendor like HP, these features must also be price competitive while offering value, as the server market is driven by price, and at margin pressure that is lower than Cisco’s norm.

However, fate of UCS still remains hanging on some important factors like the actual product launch and positioning and experiences of early adopters.

More Unified Computing Products to come into the Market

Cisco cannot be called as the first mover in this space as there are other vendors, who have similar offerings, but very few offer features and components close to what Cisco is promising to offer. Mishra believes that going forward, the market will see more vendors coming up with unified computing products, which will promise to deliver ‘Data centre in a box’.

Also from an R&D perspective, vendors are clearly investing in these kinds of efforts. “As we are moving towards a real-time infrastructure vision, this category of products, which has all features and functionalities built into one box, one architecture, is definitely going to be desirable,” concluded Mishra.