Cisco serves up Unified Computing push

As was widely expected, Cisco Systems on Monday unveiled its Unified Computing effort, including the company's move to offer its own server hardware.

The networking titan's Unified Computing System targets data centers, facilities where enterprises locate a hefty number of servers that host and run the technology side of their operations. It is designed to unify networking, computing, storage, and virtualization resources in order to streamline a company's resources, to reduce its total cost of ownership, and to "radically reduce" the number of devices requiring management, power/cooling, and other labor and financial expenditures.

(Credit: Cisco Systems)

Among the hardware components of the system:

• Cisco UCS 6100 Series Fabric Interconnects, a family of line-rate, low-latency, lossless, 10Gbps Cisco Data Center Ethernet and FCoE interconnect switches

• Cisco UCS 5100 Series Blade Server Chassis, which supports up to eight blade servers and up to two fabric extenders.

• Cisco UCS 2100 Series Fabric Extenders, which provide up to four 10Gbps connections each between blade servers and the fabric interconnect.

• Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers, based on Intel Xeon processors

• Cisco UCS Network Adapters.

The Unified Computing System also includes the Cisco UCS Manager embedded software.

Partnering with Cisco in Monday's announcement were companies including Microsoft, VMware, BMC Software, and Accenture.

Update 10:45 a.m. PDT: According to Micrososft, Cisco will prepackage, resell and support the Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V technology, and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 software.

VMware, meanwhile, says the Unified Computing System will be integrated with its vCenter suite for managing virtual network policies and resources.

[lightningrob]

What's the OS on the blade servers? Linux? Solaris?

[tgrenier]

what ever customer buys, ESX, Linux, Solaris, Windows, etc...

[jtmajorx]

As posted earlier, whatever you want to Install on it. Especially true with Microsoft's HPC product fairing so well these days.

[rshimizu12]

Just watched the webcast. If Cisco wants to compete with IBM or HP they are going to have to do a much better job of marketing. The whole webcast was primarily conceptual with very little or no demo or explanation of the actual product. The brochures are not much better. They will be hard to understand for a IT person.

[koestreich]

Their product isn't even shipping yet. For a similar (and shipping) product, see http://www.egenera.com It's available on industry-standard Dell HW, rather than the newfangled stuff.

[ultra01]

rshimizu12 It's aimed at Virtualization like vSphere. One problem we have at the moment is the cost of putting in SANs and getting them to perform. They just don't out perform local storage unless you spend to earth on them. Sounds like we'll be getting some of these new toys to test out with vSphere soon :)