Slashdot Mirror
Cisco Barges Into the Server Market
mikesd81 was one of several readers to write in about Cisco's announcement of what has been called Project California — a system comprising servers made from 64-bit Intel Nehalem EP Xeon processors, storage, and networking in a single rack, glued together with software from VMWare and BMC. Coverage of this announcement is everywhere. Business Week said: "The new device, dubbed Project California, takes servers into new territory by cramming computer power into the very box that contains storage capacity and the networking tools that are Cisco's specialty. Cisco's approach could help companies use fewer machines — saving money not only on hardware, but also on power and IT staffing — in building data centers. ... Cisco is well-girded to take this step. It has more than $30 billion in cash, more than any other tech company. The company is moving into no fewer than 28 different markets, including digital music in the home and public surveillance systems." The Register provides more analysis: "Microsoft is, of course, a partner on the California system, since you can't ignore Windows in the data center, and presumably, Hyper-V will be supported alongside ESX Server on the hypervisors. (No one at the Cisco launch answered that and many other questions seeking details). ... The one thing that Cisco is clear on is who is signing off on these deals: the CIO. Cisco and its partners are going right to the top to push the California systems, right over the heads of server, storage, and network managers who want to protect their own fiefdoms."
Thought title said: "Costco Barges Into The Server Market". If so, I would've renewed my Costco card to get some cheap servers.
Cisco...saving money?!?! Right.
A server blade in a switch works WAY much better than a switch blade in a server...
I have to ask : why Nehalem EP Xeons? Those are the absolute bleeding edge chips that Intel manufactures, and as such as the most expensive by a significant margin. Newegg doesn't even have the chip listed on their website, yet carries 91 different server CPU models. While space inside the data center does cost money, and so does electricity, is it really so expensive as to be worth paying for a chip that is probably 10 times as expensive per MIP as cheaper alternatives? The motherboards are more expensive as well, especially when you factor in the huge markup for server grade parts.
The only advantage of the Nehalem is that it is SLIGHTLY faster per processing thread, but networking is usually an "embarassingly parallel" problem.
Sounds like the right architecture, but at a price.
It amazes me that so many "enterprise" IT companies can sell what are essentially just Linux servers with their brand name tacked-on, at a 5000% mark-up.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
You get a barge.
Sounds about right.
Come in through Windows and pwn the stack. What's next, Patch February?
Say hello to my little sig.
it's 2009, years after we were supposed to have flying cars, most new computers are 64bit, and Cisco refuses to release a 64bit IPSec client For x64 (64-bit) Windows support, you must utilize Cisco's next-generation Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client." . So umm...we're supposed to think they have any clue what's going on above layer 4 these days? What are they going to be installing on these servers, Windows2000?
Not sure that Cisco is such a lone cash giant as suggested. Apple has $28 billion in reserves as of Jan 22, 2009. With the recent economic fiasco, both Cisco and Apple might be in different positions.
It has more than $30 billion in cash, more than any other tech company.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
This "barges" idea sounds like the next logical step.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Microsoft is, of course, a partner on the California system, since you can't ignore Windows in the data center
Microsoft is supposed to have about 30% of the server market, so I am not sure I get that of course.
They'll fail at this, like they failed in Wireless Security. Cisco should stick to what they know, network infrastructure and backbone support. They suck at everything else.
This will be come another red headed step child just like their load balancing technology.
The one thing that Cisco is clear on is who is signing off on these deals: the CIO. Cisco and its partners are going right to the top to push the California systems, right over the heads of server, storage, and network managers who want to protect their own fiefdoms.
Presumably, they are doing this because they know that the CIOs, on average, are less well informed than their technical subordinates. It is a classic salesman's tactic: go straight to the "decision maker." I'm not saying that CIOs are not well qualified and intelligent people (I'm sure that most are). However, at the CxO level in a large company, you are a strategic thinker. You are most likely not going to be on the bleeding edge of the latest hardware trend.
To put it another way, the CIO is the "soft" target. You always go for the soft target.
Naturally, Cisco (and other vendors) know this. Hence, you go after the CIO and dazzle him with fancy presentations and wine and dine him and viola, you get a big sale. This how MS does it, and how other big tech companies do it.
If you are fortunate enough to have the ear of your CIO, make sure to warn him about snake oil peddlers.
These systems seem like the kind of all-in-one boxes that would enable an authoritarian government, say China, to log and filter the internet more easily. Of course Cisco would never sell equipment for such purposes...
First, taken at face value, ignoring 30% of a target market is generally considered not a wise idea, particularly if that 30% can be entangled in a large portion of the other 70%.
Secondly, that number isn't indicative of much on its own. Windows running Apache cuts into that 70%. And that is only measuring externally accessible websites, much of datacenter market never is reachable (i.e. most of the Top500 would count as 'datacenter' and very few would even possibly count in the linked document. In other words, the MS share is probably not 30%, but it's impossible to say if it is higher or lower without more data.
HP and IBM offer blade enclosures that offer internal storage and networking blades, and they offer modules that can aggregate network and storage traffic leaving the system into high speed trunks connecting directly to the network or storage backbone.
Other than being ridiculously expensive, how is Cisco's offering any different?
Cisco has been quietly working towards this for a while. You can get a server module for the lowly 1800 series router.
For large networks and satellite office, you have a server or 2, a phone system, network gear, maybe some video surveillance gear. They'll walk into the CIO's office and say:
"you have all this gear from different vendors, with different support contracts and different departments finger pointing when problems arise."
"Now here is the cisco way, one box, one department, one vendor to call. Stick it in a closet and forget about it. Let us show you all our management tools which show everything in a single pane of glass"
If they do it right, it'll make for a very slick demo.
This is their attempt to do the same in the datacenter.
Now I'll have to get yet another certification.
"Yes, I am a Cisco Certified Integrated Server Professional.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Amazing stuff.
I'm stunned. One box, with processor, storage, and networking -- ALL TOGETHER in one package. Who would have thought that would be possible?
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
I used to think along the same lines as you, that with 'reasonably competent' administration, it's all a wash.
And now after a stint in the industry, I've realized a lot of the industry is unable or unwilling to invest what is required to make effective use of hardware. The stuff in general can be complex and many companies are content to pay a premium to the vendor to tap into their aggregated skills rather than probably pay even more to have architects of their own with the experience and skills to match the vendor.
In this case, they are dressing up some core technologies that are pretty well understood, wrapping up it all with a lot of buzzwords, and pushing forward. The technical cynic in me shrugs, but I recognize what they *claim* to be trying to do may be valuable to some people.
That said, after years of struggling with Cisco's repeated decisions to support their proprietary standards to the exclusion of industry standards make me not want to touch their equipment or embrace any 'full management' stack they would want to give me. Some of it does the job sufficiently, but buying into a platform that makes it difficult to entertain competing product is something I like to avoid.
This story sounds like Cisco's PR money at work. The summary contains much hyperbole and gushing superlatives:
Computer Week and The Register? That's hardly 'everywhere'.
That's what they'll tell you, but I doubt this is a magic bullet.
I'm so cynical I read this as: 'The Register copied and pasted more from the Cisco press-release.'
As for going direct to the CIO, well that's not surprising, they're the least competent people with the most power. Of course they're going to the CIO.
Yep. That's the Cisco I know and loath. If you can't convince the literate, just move up the org chart.
Years ago, at my institution (150+ buildings, about 15K active IP addresses,) we did a cost analysis of our Cisco addition and decided that it was unnecessary. We could do everything we needed with cheaper, commodity devices.
So, for the next couple years, all upgrades/replacements were to simpler structures. To non-proprietary protocols. And to non-Cisco equipment. We have been Cisco-Free for about 4 years.
The hardest part was beating off the attacks from Cisco Sales. These attacks were vicious. They lied (even more than usual for Cisco sales droids.) They tried their best to discredit us. First they approached the head of IT. Then the VP for Business. Then the president.
Finally, they went to the Board of Regents. They said we were incompetent. They said our actions were endangering the future of our institution. Fortunately, the Regents decided to let us try it.
It has worked out great for us. Our capability is up. Our reliability is way up. Our security is up. Our costs are down (about 1/2 the price of equivalent Cisco.)
But, it only happened because upper management was willing to trust us. I get the impression that most management would fold under the pressure we saw.
Miles
Well since Cisco has control over Layer 2-3, this strategy would start to make a lot of sense if they started using proprietary hardware and software to effectively lock out other vendors. Who is to say that they won't able to do that at the CPU-level, since the fact that they have a partnership w/ Intel with their latest cpu. This business has worked in the past, who says history won't repeat itself...
If any one word could describe Cisco's project as over-priced, over-rated, inflexible and completely about name brand recognition without substance, it would be California.
There are lots of nice things about California, but without question, it is way too expensive to live there. The taxes are out of control. And no matter which side of the fence you live on, California is filled with whack jobs and shallow people... just like Cisco.
I have been re-examining what Cisco brings compared to what other inexpensive or even free products bring and I have to say that Cisco is amazingly over-priced. They price themselves that way because people presume Cisco is the best. I think when people realize their needs can be met in better, less expensive ways, Cisco will have to re-evaluate their strategy.
At the small ISP I worked at, we pretty much bought into Cisco for several years. We had an AS5200 PRI for our full 56k PRI lines, and a 3000 series model (can't recall which one) as our gateway router. This worked fine until we started rolling out some more advanced networking, such as proprietary 900mhz and 2.4ghz wireless. Suddenly we were faced with either having to upgrade this equipment (some of it not so young), and the costs were not insignificant.
I asked my boss to give me a couple of weeks to see what I could put together with some of our old Pentium II boxes. Now I fully realize that software routing just isn't as good as Cisco's hardware routing, but damn it all, the price was cheap. Even buying new mini-ATX boxes for up on the towers was considerably cheaper than anything Cisco would offer. Whatever performance boost we'd get from Cisco hardware (or Nortel or whatever) simply couldn't justify the vast difference in pricing.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Check-out time is, uh....
Lemmings are silly; dinosaurs are extinct.
...That Juniper (arguably Cisco's largest competitor) is going to be sucked up by IBM or HP, and integrated just like this?
Unto the upright there arises light in the darkness...
Not everything remotely related to Microsoft is astroturfing. This story probably wouldn't have been tagged as 'astroturfing' had the word 'Microsoft' not been in it.
"I like it when the red water comes out.."
But from what I've seen, their server technology appears relatively weak. I.e. their blades appear less dense than 1U servers. I'm not surprised though, in recent history even in their core competency of networking, density and performance have not been impressive compared to competition.
I think the same end could have been achieved by pulling together a partnership. Then again, they already have enough high-margin vendors in play to probably price this thing out there without pulling in yet another company that would insist on their slice.
I personally would have rather seen something a bit more fresh, like getting behind and committing to a technology like KVM instead of VMWare. I know, that would be marketing suicide, and I shouldn't be looking to the traditional powerhouses to snub VMWare yet with their current market position, but it would've been interesting.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Cisco might have a good shot at this. Project California might look appetizing to a lot of IT departments. Virtualization and consolidation is on the agenda for a lot of datacenters at the moment. All of these functions in one box, in one rack, AND easily manageable would appeal to a lot of CIOs. Deal with one vender instead of three - and a reputable vendor at that. Knowing Cisco, it will most likely be a bit pricey. But hey, no one ever got fired for buying Cisco right? On the other hand, a lot of people have been fired for blowing the budget.
I think both Dell and HP can sell a total solution with their badge throughout. Dell admittedly isn't much on 'total stack support', but HP certainly is in that game.
One could argue that the HP rebadged switches are not 'cisco'-good, but by the same token I'll wager the Cisco-servers aren't 'HP'-good.
Conspicuously absent from that game is of course IBM, which hasn't had it's name on a piece of non-blade networking equipment in a long time and after the whole Lenovo thing, really isn't in a position to offer single-vendor. Strange with so many companies eager to get that marketing bullet point, IBM runs screaming away from it.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It's Cisco. Their product won't be cheap. As an infrastructure engineer that is having to stretch the hell out of the dollar. I've found myself purchasing far less Cisco products and a lot more of the alternatives. Today, small scale scaling out for the most part has become pizza box servers and Juniper networking. Pizza box because I can get far more bang for the buck buying a full rack of dual quad core Dell PE1950s for less than I can buy a decked out IBM S chassis for. That consists of 6 servers and 12 drive SAN setup with an internal switch. (pretty much a networking/storage/server all-in-one architecture that Cisco is releasing) I'm not sure why they are making this out as if Cisco is the first to do this. They aren't. Bang for the buck is what I'm looking for. Not just a fully packaged solution. They are nice, but if I need 80 cores, thats going to be damn expensive.
OK. My bias up front - I work for Sun.
That said, there were several pre-Cisco-announcements from HP, IBM, and Sun about how the California system is a no-go. Admittedly, they're the competitors for Cisco, but after having looked at the existing rack blade/switch systems from those three vendors, I really don't see any difference worth mentioning from current product lines.
Here's some thoughts:
Overall, this looks like a stupid move. I realize that Cisco needs to look for more revenue streams in the face of the commoditizing of most network gear, but this seems like an '80s solution to a 2010 problem.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
I'm stunned. One box, with processor, storage, and networking -- ALL TOGETHER in one package. Who would have thought that would be possible?
Every /.er running linux on an old P266 with a network card?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
No Linux. No BSD. Lame.
Whoosh!
How the heck can _Cisco_ get into the server market...most of their hardware is rebranded HP stuff!
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Is anyone else thinking "single point of failure"?
since you can't ignore Windows in the data center...
I couldn't agree more - ignoring Windows in the data center, i.e., forgetting to patch it, leaving it alone for too long, connected to a network, etc... is a recipe for disaster.
Oh, wait, did someone mean they can't ignore the prospect of using Windows in a data center? Did someone just imply that those of us who have been using IBM mainframes and Sun servers and Linux boxes can't do without Windows in our data centers?
Please. Many a pristine uptime has been ruined by putting Windows in the data center, and while I'll admit they have made strides in improving their OS, it is still nowhere near the reliability of UNIX servers, let alone mainframes. A few years ago, the London Stock Exchange suffered an outage after deciding to go with Windows instead of Linux. Even if there are no future outages, they won't return to 5 nines of uptime until well into the next century.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Egenera has been doing the same thing for almost 8 years. They did it first on their hardware and now on Dell Blades. Ironically several people from the Cisco side working on this came from Egenera and the messaging is almost identical.
Egenera Website
cramming computer power into the very box that contains storage capacity and the networking tools
My head spun after reading the sentence. What are present servers/desktops, if not all in one box?
Is when can I get my Cisco Certified Server Professional certification for a nominal fee?
OH GOD YES YES I DO
Oh, great, the company that has done for routing what microsoft has done for desktops and what oracle has done for databases, kept them 20 years behind where they would be if none of these companies existed, wants to fuck the server market. YEAH!!!
And sucks hard. They ship mutually incompatible binaries on the same CD. The installer itself will bomb. They suck. Did I mention, they suck?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
It's a similar idea (up to six blades sharing up to 14 SAS drives and up to 2 switches with a web interface to control the whole thing) and it's been available for over a year.
egenara?
Why bundle storage with it? It makes no sense. I would assume companies that are shelling out the $$$ for these servers already have a storage infrastructure in place -- that's much more reliable, tested, and faster than anything Cisco can provide.
Yeah, I couldn't get that either...
Then I thought maybe they're trying to cram a storage array and a switch into the same box. With the proper virtualization engine, you'd essentially have a data center in a box. Right now we can sort of do this with blades. Need a new server? Just pop in a blade. But with everything virtualized it becomes even easier. Need a new server? Just configure one in the GUI.
not vendor.
This isn't about servers or networks. This is about a Cloud Computing Future where every switch that is installed is a node added to the World Wide Server.
However, a *vendor* still can't afford to neglect MS, since so many customers have drunk the MS kool aid.
An individual organization can afford to ignore Windows much of the time. A company seeking to become more of a single source to as many people as possible can't afford to ignore MS or Linux, and even ignoring Solaris, AIX, and FreeBSD is dubious even for vendors that are not Sun or IBM.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It should run Wordpad on Windows 8 reasonably. With new ribbon interface!
But wordpad in windows 7 already has the ribbon.
There is exceedingly fat margins in storage, *even* by cisco standards, and that's a high benchmark. The SAN market is a vendors dream, where nickel and diming every little feature and even every little port on every switch is the status quo, except the nickles and dimes are more like 5 and 10 thousand dollars.
As far as technical reasons, they are mostly not there. One exception is that Cisco is pushing to replace FC with Ethernet, presumably with the promise of an escape from the painful FC market practices. Though assuredly they will bring some of the market behaviors over, they will make it somewhat easier to make the sale. They tried to just release a product into that market against the likes of Brocade and QLogic, but I think Cisco has realized their only substantial chance to stay vital is to suck in storage infrastructure into their fabric they have some reputation in, ethernet.
People are already starting more and more to consider other vendors 'good enough' for traditional networking needs. Cisco wants to own the whole mess so that people will be more afraid to move off.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Barges into the server market? This almost makes it sound as if there's something wrong with that. I'm all for as many players as possible in the market. Competition can only improve things for everyone.
Now I fully realize that software routing just isn't as good as Cisco's hardware routing
Depends which box you're talking about but sometimes "hardware routing" is just software routing on an embedded processor. Something to keep in mind.
> How low can the Register go?
You seem to like it well enough when they publish something you like.
For example: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/21/microsoft_vs_mankind/comments/
Will Hill, that's you, correct?
You also posted Here:
As AC, but there's no mistaking you, anywhere.
[...] a chip that is probably 10 times as expensive per MIP as cheaper alternatives
What's MIP? "Million Instructions Per"?
Those are the absolute bleeding edge chips that Intel manufactures, and as such as the most expensive by a significant margin.
Riiiight.
The 2.26GHz DP is $373, and it's roughly comparable to the 2.8 penryn.. which is $700+.
Try again, plz.
Think of the licensing fees! The humanity!
... er, you mean you want to let user X also e-mail users A, B, C ... and sometimes J? Harrumph. That wasn't in the spec. No mind. Just sign here, please.
...
You want E-mail? Sure, no problem. Sign here.
Wait, all your users want e-mail? OK, you'll need a hardware upgrade. And don't forget the licenses. Sign here, please.
Oh, sure, user X can e-mail user Y. No problem.
Oh, yes, sure, we do printing. We have a license for printing. Word documents? No problem. Sign here. You say you also sometimes print e-mails? We might be able to do that without a hardware upgrade. Let me check with engineering. Meanwhile, please sign here for the license
You get the idea. Multiply by the number of things you actually do and the factorial of your user numbers.
Whatever performance boost we'd get from Cisco hardware (or Nortel or whatever) simply couldn't justify the vast difference in pricing
I'm not a network guru, but isn't there a lot more to it than plain performance? I'm thinking about easy to set up redundancy, fast recovery (fast booting), low power usage, stability, less moving parts etc.
These are all pretty bad with standard PC equipment.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
It's so innovative it must be a rebranded Apple product.
Depends on what you mean with standard PC equipment.
Very low power can be accomplished with, for example, VIA or Atom. You get fast recovery by stripping a linux dist down to the initrd plus whatever you actually need, or possibly even a pre-hibernated image if you're stateless. Stability is best accomplished by using standardized parts tested by millions before you (frankly, I'd say standard PC equipment tends to be significantly more stable than proprietary hardware, but that's just my experience). Less moving parts is solved by moving to SSD disk and using passive cooling and appropriate components.
The equipment that falls into the standard PC range is amazingly wide these days and certainly includes embedded-equivalent systems.
Desktop PCs can boot up faster than a typical Cisco router. PC servers on the other hand tend to like to spend many seconds to say stuff like "ctrl-A for Raid config screen" etc.
With the exception of the "linksys" level stuff, Cisco routers and switches aren't really low power devices.
Cisco used to be great - decent stuff, better service and support.
Now if they are not careful, Huawei and friends will kill them at the low end and the Juniper bunch will kill them at the other.
Years ago, at my institution (150+ buildings, about 15K active IP addresses,) we did a cost analysis of our Cisco addition and decided that it was unnecessary. We could do everything we needed with cheaper, commodity devices.
Can you say what companies you went with in what capacities? Juniper? Force10? ProCurve? Other?
Any interface or management tools for such virtualized pool systems, brought to you by the company that wrote and maintains IOSS, already has a serious hurdle to jump. That language is very, very clever and flexible. It is also absolutely awful for attempting to do simple, straightforward configuration tasks that _look_ like they should work from the documentation, but which extra steps to actually provide and can only be done directly from the text interface, not from _any_ of the GUI's. (I spent some time trying to configure proper failover behavior last year on a set of switches. It was painful.)
If their virtualization management tools are similarly powerful, flexible, and utterly useless to anyone not a highly trained Cisco technician, then these systems will be very expensive and under-utilized doorstops in most environments. If, however, they've fired the fools who wrote the IOS control language and replaced them with people being fired by Juniper and thus raised the IQ at both companies, then they have a chance to fill a serious niche in environments like Wal-Mart, where a centrally managed and flexible system could manage inventory, sales registers, their highly automated security and power management, and personnel records. Putting all those on different servers provided by different vendors is nightmarish to manage: having a consistent, virtualized hardware environment makes hardware repairs and upgrades far, far more efficient, in my experience.
And let's face it: when I've looked at the stock room at such a facility, I've often seen a server or desktop stashed under someone's desk, lying on top of a card table in a corner where it never got mounted but is still in use, or miscabled and unscrewed down with only one plug in on top of a rack with an overloaded UPS. Simplifying and modularizing that for such an environment would be a big headache that I wouldn't have to have for dealing with such partners and clients. (I highly recommend taking a cell phone and taking pictures of such setups to let their head office know there is a problem.)
Great!
Now the Chinese government has storage as well as firewall technology all in one unit to track down and torture/imprison anyone it doesn't like using the internet.
It just makes it so gosh darn convenient.
I junked all of my Cisco gear in my enterprise, so GOOD LUCK getting the CIO to look at his Linux network/server infrastructure and replace it with over priced, under performing gear in this business climate.
LA DE DA DA.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
It could work out well for everyone.
But here's a way the industry can work, in that, Microsoft gets to be the "bad" guy to protect the hardware vendors of today from new competition. I can imagine IBM, Dell, HP all giving Microsoft a call, and asking them for Cisco-like networking and storage administration features for Windows Server. It's a tough market for Microsoft to break into but ... they could do it. Microsoft also works with hardware vendors to get more and more packet slicing features into hardware... Taiwan is only too happy to help.
Once Microsoft establishes how that software would work and the hardware people deliver the commodity hardware, the Linux people begin copying it and in fairly short order there is GNU-[fill in microsoft name] here.
Over time, the cost of high end networking plunges and the software to manage, egged on by competition from Cisco, Microsoft and Linux, gets better and better. Broadband everywhere suddenly becomes a lot faster, a lot better, and a lot cheaper, and so many of today's networking administrators start looking like the steam engine fireman when the diesel comes around.
As networking administration costs fall, providers can profitably roll out broadband to more and more people. Local governments can -finally- deploy their own broadband for everyone, if they want to. Perhaps in twenty years, all major cities have some form of public broadband.
This is my sig.
O.K, a little box with a few CPUs, put as much external connectivity inside the box and say I have saved the world. Blade servers have been around for awhile. Virtualization is old hat. Mainframes have been doing this for a long time. IBM has been doing virtualization at the OS level since the 60's and at the hardware level since at least the early 80's. Depending on workload an IBM z10 can have thousands of virtual OS's running in less than 20 sq of floor space. Just about the same space as 3 standard server racks. I know of company running about about 500 virtual Linux images on a single 10-way z9. The z10 has about twice the capacity of a z9. On average a z9 uses less energy than a single rack of blade servers and the z10 uses less energy than a z9. If you want you can now run Solaris on an IBM mainframe under z/VM. There is another company that has just released a product that allows you to run virtual Windows systems on an IBM mainframe. Yes, Microsoft Windows running on an IBM mainframe. Its like people don't realize that this is OLD technology not new. The idea if a few big computers running everything and sharing resources is all what mainframes have been about and are still about.
Maybe many years ago, but even in the late 1990s I found even trying to get some technical information out of them to be an insanely complex process. I wouldn't buy Cisco now even if I had a limitless budget.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"The new device, dubbed Project California, takes servers into new territory by cramming computer power into the very box that contains storage capacity"
Are telling me that Cisco put a computer in a box where the Disks are?!??!?!?! Thats ground breaking! Amazing! Unheard of! I mean, wow, can you imagine if HP/Dell had thought this up First...instead of Proj California....maybe they would have called it a DL380! Or Sun, an dcall it a Thumper! Cisco is truely the inovator!
Side note, I actually saw an article on this yesterday that had the nerve to use the phrase "lower CAPEX" and the word Cisco in the same sentence.
Highlarious.
Dimes
EMC
not BMC, you coax-retaining slob.
I've worked on a lot of different gear over the years and it seems from a server perspective whether you go with IBM, Dell, Sun, or HP there are only slight differences between them. Certainly not enough to make me as a technician prefer one over another. They all have their strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately they've also tried to manipulate their legacy systems to work for virtualization. Even their blade offerings are geared toward traditional one OS per box setups. They've gotten better but the I/O options don't fit the bill. Virtual desktops are becoming one of the fast growing markets and servers built for virtualization are going to take the cake when it comes time to move to a fully virtual enterprise. The benefits are too great to ignore.
So what does this mean? Cisco has placed themselves in the forefront of this technology. Not because of the server or the management. It's the architecture. Processor and RAM specs will continue to grow bigger and bigger but I/O options are confusing, complicated to setup, and are overall lacking in most of the options available by today's vendors. Cisco is releasing the Nexus 1000v virtual switch to replace Vmware's vswitch included in ESX. They've released the Nexus 5000 and Nexus 7000 to connect to their blades and more specifically to drive the convergence of networks to Ethernet. They're trying to finalize the standard for Data Center Ethernet which can handle the low latency we see in fibre channel and can still provide iSCSI and typical data connections all over the same wire. This is where I see the value in this setup. I buy the box and can attach to any of the many storage options commonly in use in today's data centers. I'm not a hardcore Cisco guy, in fact I've been enjoying working on a lot of Procurve lately among other products. That being said, Cisco has designed a system around virtualization. Everything else in the presser is mentioned as secondary and even the product descriptions point toward virtualization. If it all works as advertised it could be a VERY cost effective solution for either large enterprises or even the medium business looking for a totally virtual solution.
Of the IBM solution.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.