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."

Comments

Re:Why use bleeding edge intel chips?

[trims]

I work for Sun, and have been beta testing Nehalems for almost a year now.

Sun is also the PRIMARY Nehalem vendor for Intel. We got the special treatment (I don't know how), but we get to be the first real Tier-1 vendor shipping Nehalems, and let me tell you that Intel has helped us a lot in hardware integration and software tuning.

The end result is that Nehalem EP (which are dual-socket systems) is significantly faster than any of the Core2 series, and spanks even the AMD Shanghais. They've gone to the on-chip memory controller ala Opterons, and it's helped considerably. In addition, they've redone the interconnect bus to make is much more HyperTransport-ish (though HT 3.x is still superior) - it's called QuickPath Interconnect. The overall result is much better performance under load, even for single-threaded apps.

For an application such as Virtualization, Nehalems are well worth the $$$. You get considerably better loaded performance than previous Intel CPUs, and with VMs, high system utilization is the GOAL. Up until now, AMDs were considerably better than Intel chips under high load, but the Nehalems just stole the dual-socket crown back.

I'm still waiting to get my hands on the EX series (quad-socket), so I don't know how they'll compare to AMD's 8000-series. Be interesting to see.

-Erik