5 Things About Cisco Announcement and a Wrap Up[Post Prandial]

Lets have a Recap

So Cisco announced its server today. A few quick bul­let points if you didn’t pay attention:

1. Cisco announced some­thing that is more like a fab­ric of serv­ers, or a net­work of serv­ers. I think they run VMware only and they have very large CPU/​Memory/​IO bus archi­tec­tures but stand­ard Intel for all that.
2. They have shoe­horned a big arse net­work blade into the chassis that con­nects to net­work and stor­age. Plus it is con­fig­ur­a­tion mech­an­ism. That is, a cent­ral con­fig­ur­a­tion fab­ric for clusters of bare metal serv­ers to act in con­cert and become a single or many vir­tual instances. Then VMware runs on top of that. One term I heard is Processing Area Network which seems to sum it up.
3. Lots of stor­age vendor love from NetApp and EMC.
4. Same for the usual, but large, crowd of “me too’s” like Accenture for con­sult­ing, Emulex etc for spe­cific accessories
5. Unusually, Microsoft came out sup­port­ing the strategy.

That’s prob­ably enough. If you to geek­dive into some infro­ma­tion check out Colin McNamara who has obvi­ously be play­ing with this at Cisco. He has some good details there. Recommended.

References

Chuck Hollis at EMC expressed ser­i­ous love in his blog.
Marketwatch got the first press release, its a good enough round up.

My Top Five Takeaways

Number 5 — Cisco out­played IBM & HP at their own game

“Cisco and VMware today announced a com­pre­hens­ive, stra­tegic ori­ginal equip­ment man­u­fac­turer (OEM) agree­ment which will incor­por­ate product engin­eer­ing and integ­rated sales” — by get­ting VMWare on the same team and act­ing as their OEM, HP & IBM can hardly get too pissed. Cisco got a bet­ter pos­i­tion and out­mano­evered them.

HP, IBM and to a lesser extent, Dell, have failed to make sig­ni­fic­ant com­mit­ments to vir­tu­al­isa­tion because they think it means less sales. Which is stu­pid, it means less sales of big­ger hard­ware with more profit.I’m bet­ting that bone­heads inside IBM/​HP/​Dell can­not really under­stand the dif­fer­ence between volume and profit. Not really, not enough to actu­ally do any­thing anyway.

On the other hand, Cisco is not tak­ing HP/​IBM/​Dell head on so they can stay “frenemies”. This isn’t tak­ing away desktops or SME serv­ers or even tra­di­tional serv­ers. But is does steal their lead­er­ship on the next gen­er­a­tion of tech­no­logy and thus kills their growth. Even if HP/​IBM/​Dell pull some tech­no­logy out of the hat that isn’t from Intel (and that is very unlikely), it will be too late as the Cisco Markenaut will have stifled any opportunity.

For a mar­ket­ing tri­umph that nails the coffin shut, Cisco has brought Microsoft (can you believe that), plus EMC, NetApp and raft of other vendors onto their team.

Number 4 — Huge Professional Services Opportunity

Bifurcation of Professional Services Delivery — as usual. On one hand Cisco is part­ner­ing with their Data Centre part­ners (accen­ture, Tata, et al) but also ” Cisco will also offer vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion con­sult­ing ser­vices to help cus­tom­ers accel­er­ate the deploy­ment of Unified Computing Systems across their datacenters…”.

And you when accen­ture lines up to endorse some­thing you know that con­sult­ing is in the mix. They can sniff it out and latch on quicker than a vam­pire can get to blood in a blood bank.

So Cisco has the resellers on side, and those Cisco reseller part­ners that signed up for Data Centre spe­cial­isa­tion will have huge grins today.

Number 3

Infrastructure Orchestration — thats like the One Ring in Lord of the Rings. One inter­face to con­fig­ure all the resources, stor­age, net­work­ing, CPU, memory inside the server frame/​network. More import­antly they are fully abstrac­ted from the OS, and this includes VMWare. This can be accom­plished with a spare “bare metal” server where a new host can be cre­ated on the fly, all the way down-​​do the same NIC con­fig­ur­a­tion as the ori­ginal server.

Folks, this is grade A, num­ber one good­ness. Dollars are going leap out of Enterprise pock­ets to grab hold of this. Lets pre­tend that server people will actu­ally under­stand the con­cepts here (and many will not), but my under­stand­ing sug­gests that I can cre­ate hard­ware archi­tec­tures that look exactly like my cur­rent serv­ers and then drop my cur­rent OS/​Application soft­ware dir­ectly on top.

Imagine port­ing that CiscoWorks server you built three years ago dir­ectly onto emu­lated hard­ware, on emu­lated vir­tual machine, in vir­tual pla­torm. It needs no changes and no migration.

Dream or real­ity but that’s the mar­ket­ing mes­sage today.

And make no mis­take, this is the Enterprise product for build­ing private clouds. None of the namby pamby pre­tend­ing that pub­lic clouds will work and save the known uni­verse from all ills. Public clouds are fif­teen to thirty years away when the applic­a­tions will be ready. This is ready now.

This product allows us to spin private Enterprise clouds. I call this Misty Computing. Its close, on the ground, and some­what tangible.

I’m still not con­vinced about FCoE, but it doesn’t look like there much choice to date. I’m still hope­ful though (Hi Doug and Omar )

Marketing — oh boy, it’s gonna be hard

Sadly, we are going to see an enorm­ous mar­ket­ing push from Cisco. I don’t know if I can stand it, but, lets face it, most people are not going to under­stand this tech­no­logy and will need to be pushed, cajoled, shoved, encour­aged and led to water before there will be uptake.

And I’m tired of that. Just tell me the truth and let me get on.

Shiny — its really shiny. And I Like SHINY.

Told you it was SHINY.

Conclusion

It’s inter­est­ing that, in a way, it looks as if Cisco has pro­duced a net­work of serv­ers. Compared to the cur­rent meth­od­o­logy of put­ting serv­ers into your net­work, this makes sense now that vir­tu­al­isa­tion means that OS, and applic­a­tions in the future, will be fully mobile (not bound to single sil­icon instance).

Whether cus­tom­ers are ready for this product remains to be seen, but so far, it’s hard to believe it won’t be suc­cess­ful. I sus­pect that HP/​IBM/​Dell just lost a sig­ni­fic­ant por­tion of the Enterprise Cloud market.

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