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Cisco Launching Blade Servers in 2009
minutetraders writes "According to some sources, by next year Cisco Systems will be in the blade server business. ChannelWeb has a story, confirmed by several sources, that the San Jose, Calif.-based networking behemoth is readying blade servers, code-named California, for a release early next year. A blade server offering would put Cisco in direct competition with the likes of Dell, HP, and IBM, companies it partners with on their respective blade server offerings, for control of the enterprise data center."
a buddy of mine (who used to work for Cisco) says they'll be pushing linux, but offer windows if that's what the customer wants to pay for.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
If cisco delivered servers the way it delivers network gear:
You will order your blades and get them 3 months later after harassing your rep over and over until they finally send them via VP signatures via a warehouse.
When people want servers, they want them in days... not months.
This can only end poorly.
I wonder which pre-installed Linux distro they won't give you the source to.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Cisco has been pushing into the Fibre Channel switch market also, and those switches have control processors running Linux on them. They were pushing various software companies to port things like SAN backup applications onto those processors. Ironically they refused to let us consider porting a custom data mover application from our archive software into the switch because we were an end user.
Since ChiefArcher mentioned a gripe about Cisco (delays in shipping hardware), I'll mention mine too. They make great hardware. I don't think anyone can dispute that. However their server software for managing that hardware is just....crap. Cisco Security Manager is slow, non-clusterable except with 3rd party (Veritas) software, and has some really dangerous default behavior which can't be changed. The backend runs on a server and a thick client is an administrator's interface to the backend and/or to network devices. In the case of CSM the devices are IDSs, firewalls, and VPNs. THe thick client is just that, thick. It is developed in Java and is just horrendously slow. A change in the thick client running on XP can require a restart of the services *on the server* thereby basically requiring an administrator to make the change anyway. It is ludicrous.
Their other management app, LAN Management Solution, is just a cobbled together bunch of stuff that seems to barely work. If you breathe wrong it can break. We use the Solaris version at work. It doesn't have a thick client; all management is through a web browser. Managing it on the CLI at the OS level though is dog slow (takes 10 minutes to completely startup). The least little change in the GUI requires a restart. It is also expensive just like CSM (CSM is mid 5 digits for a single server to manage 500 devices). We've found many faults with both apps at work over the last 6 months beyond what I've mentioned above. I recommend staying away from them. I hope that their adventures into blade servers is better. They seem to do better at hardware than software.
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