Perspectives & Strategy

It could have been predicted, as soon as Cisco announces its new Unified Computing System (see my earlier article) this creates the opening shot in the war for the new data centre. HP believes there are many holes in the Cisco offering claiming that their solutions scale from SMB through to global corporate solutions. One criticism is that the VNTag protocol is not compliant with current networking equipment. That said Cisco did state in their initial announcement that much of the new infrastructure would be new – does this mean we should ignore it? No, but my fear is that this immediately adds to the cost, which will be resisted at the current time.

HP argues that Cisco’s offering is not unification, but simply a change of control. Workload balancing, replication, optimization, power management all have to be managed and the demand today is for more control of these vital aspects of the infrastructure. What has become clear since my first article is that Cisco will be manufacturing blade servers, although they claim not to be competing with other blade platforms, indeed Cisco are looking to incorporate EMC, Red Hat, VMware, Microsoft and other products. One point of friction between Cisco and HP looks to be a failure to communicate that could put in jeopardy existing partnerships between the two.

The IT manager must also think about the impact of security when an infrastructure change of this magnitude is contemplated. According to a recent article in Baseline (click here) “The total cost to a company of recovering from a single data breach reached $6.6 million in 2008“, this represents a significant risk factor that must be considered seriously if you intend to change the structure of the data centre.

I am not favouring one solution over another I am thinking of the CIO and their best interests. What I see here to some extent is Cisco looking for a larger slice of the Data Centre market that may be constrained this year is expected to grow by 5% or 6% per year for the next three years. This will inevitably be a developing story over the comming weeks.

Further reading:

Unified Data Centre Infrastructure: A Look at a New Technolgy by Peter B. Giblett

Why Unified is the Hot New Idea for Data Centers by Information Week

Cisco – A Unified Data Center Fabric by Business Data Management

The Cost of Data Breaches by Baseline