The rise of iSCSI and is NAS implementations clearly shows that FC/FCoE does not have a long term future and acts only as a transition mechanism for legacy FC-attached storage

For your regular network communication, the fabric will support traditional TCP/IP traffic. Also, there is nothing to indicate that FCoE is going to be transient. It will become a standardized protocol and 10GBoC will proliferate.

There is nothing revolutionary about UCS, more like a very small step in evolution for virtualization. I do not miss that Cisco needed to do something unusual to penetrate an (otherwise) closed market, specifically, the marketing needed to have a narrative that could transcend the noise from IBM /HP /Dell, and this is the result. But doing some fancy silicon tricks and closed form packaging is not a benefit.

I retain an open mind. Today, the system is unusable except for niche use cases, and the wider market has no interest in cloud computing.

A a result, UCS boils down to server with a fancy NIC. There is no change to Windows/Linux, no change to Intel architecture, no change to anything, but a bit of silicon in the gear box.

YAWN.

I think you have missed quite a bit of the details around what UCS does as well as how it compares to the competitors. To compare them both you are going to have to go a bit deeper than you have gone. However I understand that often in a blog post this is not the purpose.

UCS is a lot more than a fancy NIC, its the far beyond that with abstraction at a large scale. You can do some of this with Virtual Connect but you need extra sauce to do it outside of chassis.

UCS breaks the mold in quite a few other areas, I would suggest you have bit more of a dig. If you are keen, grab a copy of the California book.

Having played with the kit for the last few weeks I can attest that its a lot more than smoke, and it has not caught on fire yet.

Cheers

Rodos

So, I think the other differentiator for the UCS is the ability to manage it more holistically–more comprehensively and in a way that is more virtualization aware than currently possible with other solutions. I know there is not a whole lot of detail about UCSM right now, but I did a couple of recent blog posts on this and I promise more detail is shortly forthcoming.

On a totally different topic, being the “official FCoE standard bearer” , I know we have agreed to disagree on the FCoE front, but I am curious–what would you need to see in the industry (beyond final FCoE and DCB standards) or our approach to change your mind about FCoE having some legs.

Regards,

Omar Sultan
Cisco

I can certainly see the value of the Network Fabric concept espoused in UCS, but currently think it should be based on IP, not Ethernet. Intelligent comment welcomed!