cisco | IPNET - Part 20

Can Cisco sell ‘unified’ vision to a tough server crowd?

Cisco Cisco’s biggest challenge in gaining market acceptance for its new Unified Computing System is to convince data center managers to buy blade servers from the router giant instead of from traditional, incumbent suppliers.

“Server buyers don’t have a relationships with Cisco,” says James Staten of Forrester Research. “It will be tough to convince them of the need for another player in this market.”

Cisco last week finally took the wraps off of its long-anticipated UCS platform, which incorporates internally developed blade servers and is designed to tightly integrate data center computing, storage, networking and virtualization capabilities. The blade server component has been the focus of much industry speculation over the past year, and what it might mean to Cisco’s relationships with longtime partners and blade server makers HP and IBM.

Cisco acknowledges that it will now compete with those titans in the data center blade server market. But it also claims it had no choice – and that those trying to pit Cisco and UCS directly against HP and IBM blade servers are missing the point.

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Cisco buying Flip video camera maker for $590 million

flip Cisco Thursday announced its intent to acquire privately held Pure Digital Technologies, creator of the Flip video camcorder for consumers, for $590 million in stock.

Pure Digital is a “pioneer” in developing consumer-friendly video with mass-market appeal, Cisco says. The acquisition of Pure Digital is key to Cisco’s strategy to expand momentum in the media-enabled home and to capture the consumer market transition to visual networking, the company said in a statement.

In addition to exchanging $590 million in stock for all Pure Digital shares, Cisco will provide up to $15 million in retention-based equity incentives for continuing employees. The acquisition is expected to close in the fourth quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year 2009.

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Cisco: How to achieve network redundancy with 2 interfaces

Sometime ago, during my preparation for Cisco CCIE certification, I encountered a task that I had to admit made me think a little bit, even I should see the solution from the first minute. The idea, at least as I see it, is that as much as you learn for some certification you start to see only the complex and painful part of the networking and this made me skip over the simplest solution. Something like, I learn to fly to the moon but I forget how to step on earth…

Before I start please have a look to this network topology. The task was having some statement that due to the monthly cost, R1 should use only one line (Frame-Relay) to communicate to the networks behind R2 (I took in this example Loopback0: 2.2.2.2 /32) and in case that the R1’s protocol interface to Frame-Relay cloud is going, the connection to R3 should become active and traffic should flow through there. The scope was to achive some redundancy from R1 to the rest of the network. As I said before the solution was much more simplest that I start initially to think of and you can see it immediately.

Regarding the routing since this is not the main point discussed here, I just add 2 static routes on R1 to 2.2.2.2; one route through R2 and another one through R3 (with higher distance metric). Of course I put the necessary static routes and tracking on R2 and R3.

One advice if you want to try this on your own with this topology. Do not manually shutdown the main interface to enable the backup one, as it will not work. For testing you have to find a way that the main interface is down, but not administratively down. This is just not to get angry that this method is not working.

Cisco’s UCS: A closer look

Cisco is claiming its new Unified Computing architecture will save IT departments 20% cheaper on their hardware costs and 30% on IT running costs, compared with traditional systems.Launched on Monday, March 16, the Unified Computing System unites computing, network, storage access, and visualization resources in a single energy efficient system, the company said. This puts it into direct competition with IBM, HP and other hardware vendors for the first time.

According to Jon Oltsik, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group, this are the pluses and minuses of the new Cisco product:

Pluses

Innovative packaging that requires less rack space, power, and cooling than a standard blade server.

Designed for tight integration with server virtualization and the network.

a. Cisco Virtual switch (i.e. VN-Link) replaces VMware switch. This links virtual and physical networking policy and management.

b. Cisco adds extra memory to its server platforms, which enables it to increase the ratio of virtual servers hosted on each physical server.

Cisco manages the entire UCS virtual data center with one management platform. Cisco management can be integrated with other management platforms from vendors like BMC.

The overall strength is in integrating and improving both storage and network I/O. In this regard, Cisco could have a significant performance advantage in large data center deployments.

Minuses

Extremely proprietary architecture. Heck, Cisco is implementing its own version of Ethernet (What is more standard than Ethernet, for heaven’s sake?) to consolidate storage and network I/O. The “real” standards won’t be in place for another year or two.

This is a brand new arena for Cisco where its market share is 0 percent. With Dell, HP, and IBM well established in this market, expect enterprise CIOs to proceed with extreme caution.

The advantages of this architecture are minimal in a mixed environment. Today, all enterprises have other servers, and heterogeneous server support is not a core feature of this announcement.

Systems management has always been a Cisco weakness. HP and IBM are much better positioned here.

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Sharp turns like Cisco’s have a long history

Cisco If Cisco announces its first blade servers on Monday, as expected, the news may well herald a major expansion of the dominant networking company’s business. But even though it’s the most hotly anticipated move in a long time for an IT vendor, this isn’t the first case of a company taking a big gamble on entering into a new business.

Potentially game-changing shifts have taken many forms, and none is directly comparable to Cisco’s plan or its historical context. But there are some lessons for Cisco in how those strategies have played out, according to industry analysts.

It may be hard to remember, but Intel didn’t make any chips for servers until the Pentium Pro was unveiled in 1995. The company had remained focused on PCs while giants such as IBM and Sun Microsystems built both the central computers that ran enterprise applications and the processors at the heart of those systems. PCs were used for some departmental functions such as printing, but they weren’t true servers. Leveraging its PC chip development resources and large-scale PC economics for server CPUs turned out to be a very good move for Intel and IT as a whole, spawning the industry-standard servers that dominate data centers today.

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