vmworld 2009: cisco ucs

It was amazing to see the Cisco ucs racks powering the 37000 VMs used for labs etc at vmworld. Before seeing the hardware it was not really clear to me, what is the UCS stuff, and why is Cisco doing this.

I learnt two things, first that Cisco for the first time in their history was not getting invited to data center deals! Thats shocking. The customer behavior has changed when they are building data centers, they are buying things by the rack, not server by server. So if you bought a rack from HP it was HP’s choice what switches and storage they put in it, and since HP oem’ed something else, Cisco was not getting invited. So this is as much a defensive move as it is an offensive move from cisco. It has also has implications on M&A as you would expect that storage would go the same way.

It still wires and hardware right? Well my other learning was that the sever is now an XML file! yes if you think that the PCI bus has been extended and now connects from a blade to a switch, as do the ethernet and storage ports. You can give a XML description which will translate into commands to the switches and can give you a server on the fly. If the switching is good enough you would not know the difference.