A question, if Cisco had announced storage as part of their Unified Computing System; would EMC and NetApp be quite so pro the strategy? Perhaps Cisco have decided that this campaign will be one of many battles and are picking them. But if Cisco do pull this off, an integrated storage product would be a natural evolution.
I like the Cisco vision but its lack of openess at present concerns me. I guess time will tell to how the vision firms up. A vision with a great degree of openess would be more compelling but perhaps Cisco have made the wise and pragmatic decision that the only way to make a standard is to build a de facto one.
The answer to whether NetApp would have been so pro the strategy is; I don’t know. They didn’t announce storage, so I suppose the point is speculative.
What I do know is that we’re well placed (certainly in the slideware department! http://blogs.netapp.com/shadeofblue/2009/03/ciscos-ucs-netapps-uss.html ) to make UCS more attractive as a complete data centre solution. OK, the blog’s a lighthearted positioning exercise, but the message I think is pretty self evident; if customers want UCS, then they necessarily need USS.
I’m interested by what you mean by a lack of openness in Cisco’s strategy; can you elaborate?
I don’t think that Cisco wants to be in storage. The message seems clear to me that Cisco is a networking company and they have delivered a network fabric for servers. Its not really a different message or content than what we see already.
I don’t perceive Cisco wants to get into stacking HDD’s as this market is already working with Cisco and partnering well.
Plus, since EMC owns VMware, making an enemy of them would be very counterproductive. Compare this with HP, who are already making competitive products to Cisco (ProCurve) and they have been making moves to increase their ProCurve penetration by switching Cisco customers.
Therefore its possible that Cisco is responding to HP stealing customers not taking them on.
Given Cisco’s entry into the blade market and the obvious lack of HP and IBM as UCS storage partners. it begs the question does IBM N-Series automatically get a pass given it’s OEM Netapp ?