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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"
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
But from what I've seen, their server technology appears relatively weak. I.e. their blades appear less dense than 1U servers.
Not true. It's 6U for 8 blades. I just took a look at the chassis that I have access to. Now, HP c7000 is better density than this at 16 blades in 10U. But I just want to be clear, Cisco's chassis is not less dense than 1U servers.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
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.
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.
Actually, that unit is fine. If you're comparing two alternatives, you just need to make sure the time unit is the same. It could be million instructions per hour, second, million years, whatever. Doesn't matter.
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.)