HP, Dell Respond to Cisco's Data Center Ambitions

What do Cisco Systems' key competitors in the data center systems business really think of the big networking fish that will soon be flopping around in their pond, trying to gain new market share?

Cisco announced on March 16 its Unified Computing System strategy, which includes the production of new network-centric server, software and services that will compete directly with those of Hewlett-Packard, Dell and other systems makers.

All IT vendor roads lead to the data center, and the paths that go there often cross over each other. Business is done on a slippery slope when companies that partner on some technology solutions have to become cutthroat competitors in other sectors; you can't talk too nastily about a partnering company without burning some bridges that could have been useful later on.

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However, Hewlett-Packard, which has been in the IT systems business for three generations, was pretty candid about this new challenge.

"Would you let a plumber build your house?" Jim Ganthier, HP's vice president of infrastructure software and blades, asked eWEEK. "Cisco's network-centric view of the data center is great for bandwidth management, but leaves a lot to chance in terms of service-level delivery as well as data reliability and accessibility."

HP: Been there, done that?

Ganthier said he heard the March 16 Cisco presentation introducing the new initiative, which brings in a number of partners (such as EMC, Microsoft, VMware, BMC and Accenture) to handle various parts of the UCS solutions. Cisco is providing the network infrastructure—plus a new network-centric server called the B-Class and some associated services—to sell to enterprises that are planning to refurbish their aging data centers.

"We thought, 'Nice event, but we're delivering today what they promise tomorrow,'" Ganthier told eWEEK.

"Most people I know are saying, 'HP stepping into an adjacency area such as networking—which we've done successfully with both ProCurve and VirtualConnect—well, that seems rather doable,' " Ganthier said. "But Cisco stepping into an adjacent area, such as storage or servers, and not addressing any of the other value chain or life-cycle aspects? That's a little bit harder to basically do the leap of faith on."

Cisco's new UCS strategy also appears to be a lock-in for Cisco and its partners, Ganthier said.

"The way that Cisco portrayed this thing, it's one server, one OS, one management piece, one chunk of storage," Ganthier said. "Remember the movie '2001: A Space Odyssey'?  It reminded me of the big 1 by 4 by 9 monolithic block. That is, that everything is predefined, prebuilt for you. What if somebody wants to take a different hypervisor? Or a different management construct? Cisco has already pretty much pre-chosen a lot of the components for you. Our belief is that you should have a choice."