Cisco to crash HP and IBM's data centre space

IT SEEMS THE WORD is out and, even though Cisco is not directly confirming reports about the firm moving into the blade server market, it is widely expected to happen within the next couple of months, throwing the firm into the ring with its former partners, IBM and HP.

Whilst giving the standard "can't comment on an unannounced product" spiel, senior Cisco Veep and GM of the firm's Data Center Switching and Services group, John McCool, did do rather a lot of talking about ironing out "seams" in tech, which apparently is code for branching out within the data centre beyond boring old networking.

"We're very much interested in making the whole environment - we call it unified computing - a homogeneous environment by making those seams not look like gaps in IT," noted McCool at Cisco's annual C-Scape analyst conference.

One such seam, apparently, is Cisco's Nexus 1000V, which can take a virtual machine's network and security properties with it while the virtual machine is shifted around the data center.

But, as fascinated as we can possibly be in embroidery, it's not really Cisco's seams that have us hooked. More interesting are the persistent reports that the firm is literally this close to unveiling its own internally developed blade-server system based on Intel processors and a Linux operating system.

Getting back to the sewing terminology again (sheesh, what is it with these Cisco pansies?) we hear the new system should support Cisco's unified fabric, supporting several types of data-centre traffic on just one Ethernet host bus adapter.

McCool seemed to back up this assumption, noting "we've virtualised effectively what used to be different host bus adapters. An application can still think it's talking to separate host bus adapters because you're not rewriting your application." He added, "It comes out of a single physical link so you've saved a ton of power."

One thing's for sure, IBM and HP will be none too pleased at Cisco and its seamed fabrics crashing their tea party, and analysts expect all three firms to be getting their handbags out quicker than you can shout "bitch fight!"

Alluding to that sentiment, McCool said "I would think the nature of partnerships in general is going to change," coolly adding that "there's going to be a little bit of overlap, a little bit of collaboration."

Hmmm... sounds like corporate fighting words to us. µ

L'Inq
Network World