First thoughts on Cisco United Computing Vision

My first response to Cisco’s announcement today is measured skepticism. Cisco certainly plays a central role in most modern data centers, dominating arguably the most critical infrastructure component, the network. By consolidating network, compute, storage and virtualization systems, Cisco is essentially offering a “cloud in a box.” Aside from the obvious marketing angle of leverage the current excitement around the cloud, though, it seems that Cisco is realizing they need more to drive sales of the new Nexus enterprise switch platform. However, while VMware and Microsoft are natural partners for virtualization, I’m wary of Cisco’s initial venture into the compute space. After all, a handful of companies with names like IBM, Dell and HP already have substantial experience in delivering enterprise server solutions, and I noticed none of them were listed as partners in the Cisco announcement. This is certainly a stark illustration of the new balance of power in the infrastructure world, where hypervisors and VM’s are taking precedence over bare-metal servers. Very interesting…