Slashdot Mirror
Cisco Introduces Rackmount Servers
1sockchuck writes "After shaking up the market for blade servers, Cisco Systems is launching a line of rackmount servers. But the company says its ambitions are more targeted than a full-scale 'all your racks are belong to us' assault on the volume server market. Cisco says it sees its 1U and 2U C-Series rackmount servers as offering an entry point to its Unified Computing System vision for companies who've built their data centers using rackmount servers instead of blades. But it thinks many customers will like the expanded memory capacity Cisco has built into the Xeon 5500/Nehalem EP processor."
You're a day late and a dollar short.
This market is already cornered by the likes of Dell, HP, and VMWare. Feel free to try in the market place however, but I think it's a big waste of your capitol and R&D.
Life is not for the lazy.
More RAM isn't a big deal - the 5500 series from everybody else goes up to 172GB now, and will be at least double that soon. That's plenty for now.
The density is only 1/4th that of HP's new DL1000 (video).
Interconnect is what gives these Cisco servers their shine.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Congratulations. In addition to the above story we now have to be subjected to that awful jingle. Could you have at least made some obscure reference to a geeky movie made in the eighties? Spatula city, perhaps?
Last I knew, Cisco was selling products using OEM'ed HP servers. Sure they aren't just HP servers?
HP used to provide hardware for Cisco's appliances and servers that they resold as Cisco branded gear... Call Managers and the like.
Well, HP's been really pissing off Cisco by selling ProCurve switches with lifetime warranties and converting Cisco Catalyst switch users over to HP ProCurve customers. Cisco's been losing all this SmartNet gravy that they wallow in year after year. So this is their answer... sell servers to piss in HP's very large bowl of Cheerios.
Good luck Cisco, you're entering a cut throat market with well established hardware vendors in a global recession... You've either got a large pair of brass balls or you're just really really stupid.
You're thinking of crisco
Please keep this tripe off the front page.
Thanks
- Sane slashdotters everywhere (and a few insane ones too)
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Seriously, Cisco? Yet another boring Xenon server? There are so many out there I can't tell the difference.
You could have done something unique and interesting... throw a couple ARM Cortexes into a ultra-low-power 1U server... and make it completely redundant, just for kicks. Or you could have integrated something you are good at, like, well... I guess that option is becoming slimmer.
Anyway, cheers for yet another undistinguished product entering a crowded market aimed at legacy users with falling demand.
It'll require an expensive support contract just to load any software on it or add any new hardware to it.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
What do you do when you're at the top of your market share and can't innovate to come up with something else and you've bought up every home market vendor?
Crash in on a new commodity market with an overpriced product; while maybe considered a caddilac, sell it at Mercedes prices.
All the while Juniper's chomping at your heals in your traditional space with a rock solid product and chipping away.
Wait. What?
Were Cisco is going to shine is in virtualization unification or to put it another way, better management of virtualized resources. e.g. storage, network, server. Right now admins are experiencing an explosion in their workload with all these technologies and of course staffing shortages. But there's little standardization in that space.
I think this is a great thing for Cisco. Okay, so nobody will buy their servers for regular stuff. But they will buy Call Manager servers and the like. At work we have 3 Cisco servers that are re-branded IBM boxes. One is for our Unity voicemail system and the other two are for Callmanager. When there are hardware issues, I need to call Cisco who then calls IBM to fix it. I think from a support perspective, it would be a huge benefit to actually MAKE the servers you are supporting that way support requests get processed more efficiently. Cisco doesn't just have IBM servers either, they have HP as well so that would be two vendors that they don't need to deal with anymore for support.
Is that the 40 core version of Xeon 5500?
Have divorced themselves from reason. Gartner's purpose is to tell us what Microsoft wants us to think.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I hear that it's game on! Cisco intends nothing less than openn war with all its server vendor partners including HP, IBM and Dell.
So that's an easy short. Who wants to bet against HP, IBM and Dell? To bet one against the other is arbitrage. To bet against all of them at once is just dumb.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I'm surprised Cisco didn't simply buy Sun Microsystems - a reputation for making expensive, over-engineered hardware (both).
It's only a small step for Linksys to move from making NASs and media players/extenders to PCs, so I expect we'll see a Linksys version of some of the small eee desktop etc.
I was going to reply and say the same thing, but then I saw the parent. Just to expand (for the benefit of the GP):
The concept is called opportunity cost. Basically, the if you do A, but B would have made more money, B-A= the amount of money you lost doing A = opportunity cost.
This is, incidentally, the reason that competition in free market economies pounds out inefficiencies. If a person is efficient at programming computers but inefficient at fixing cars, then he can fix his car in less time by trading his programming for car fixing. For the mechanic, it is the other way around: he can easily earn enough in a couple of hours to pay the programmer to do what would take him days. Money is, in this sense, just a medium to facilitate this kind of exchange.
Companies work the same way. If Cisco were to open a business supplying flying cars, they could probably scratch a profit. But they lack the experience, knowledge and brand to do that efficiently. However, they are very good at networking equipment, and for the same money that it would take to make cars, they could just branch off of what they now into, say, subspace communication. Meanwhile, toyota, who already understands the fundamentals of how to build nice vehicles that people want to drive, can build the flying cars.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Any news about Cisco VPN client for x64 Vista?
These new 1U/2U servers may appear to be even less interesting than the California (UCS) products that were introduced earlier this year. However, the reality is that Cisco is actually rounding out the lower end of its server product line before they introduce the much more innovative, higher end (higher margin) SMP systems later this year. Intel just announced the new SMP platforms based on 8-core processors that scale to 4 and 8 sockets. Expect Cisco to scale the socket count even further. Going into the server market with some conventional products enables them to build sales channels and ramp up the service organization to get ready for the real stuff.