So let the hyperbole begin; Cisco’s Unified Computing System has finally been announced (an amusing aside, I first found out about Project California about six months ago from…..Brocade! My Cisco Account Manager was not especially amused). It’s certainly a grand vision and a play for global domination not seen since the days of Smersh!
As has been stated, this is not simply a ‘me too’ Blade play from Cisco; this appears to be a full on, all-out assault on completely dominating the data centre space. Not since the days of mainframe dominance have we seen such an attempt to own the whole data centre. Well, not quite the whole data centre, storage seems to be currently the missing piece, Cisco are relying on their partners such as EMC and NetApp to provide the storage piece.
It is going to be interesting to say the least to see how HP, IBM and Sun et al react to this. I could see opportunities for Sun but it relies on them beginning to see the light and admitting to themselves that they are actually a software company. They could embrace the UCS platform and really start to shift. HP and IBM have problem now in that they need to put together a competing vision; it’ll be interesting to see what this vision is.
What do I think? It’s too early to say but Cisco are going to be very aggressive about this and their marketing is going to be much further up the food-chain than mere ‘Bods. Over the past months, I have come to the realisation that things need to change in Infrastructure and especially Infrastructure teams.
We have too many specialists, too many people who can only do one thing or at least profess to do one thing. There are far too many vested interests in many support organisations and there is a level of complicity which has reflected the status quo in the industry, I won’t step on your toes if you don’t step on mine.
Cisco’s vision challenges this world view and even if you don’t buy into the Cisco vision in its entirety; it is a vision which merits a second look.
And it’s not Cisco which powers this vision, it’s the virtualisation brought by products like vmware, Hyper-V and Xen. But it’s a vision which is really very old…what the hell happened Big Blue? How on earth did you let Cisco re-invent your original vision and claim it for themselves?
All Cisco needs at this point, is to acquire an array vendor, and then they will have a genuinely unified computing model. There’s always the rumor that they might acquire EMC, but maybe a smaller shop like Compellent or Xiotech?
Great post Sto-bod! I agree with your assertion that Cisco’s vision challenges the world view – it challenged mine. I don’t buy into it necessarily but there is no doubt that it is a very big deal.
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What happened to Big Blue? They flew too close to the sun and tried to launch world domination architectures that never panned out. They forgot that customers want to determine the cost of their infrastructures. On a smaller scale they tried making OS/2 and PS/2 into PC architectures that were not as nimble as development efforts on Windows and EISA. Nobody talks about it much anymore, but IBM’s SAA was one of the best things to ever happen to Windows back in the day.
At some point I am going to write a post about the ‘curse of the generalist’. I’ve been meaning to do it for ages but that’s my way.
Point is that IT needs more generalists, able to talk IP, FC, Ethernet, *nix, Windows, Oracle, load balancers as well as application and information architecture etc. etc. etc. We’ll always need specialists but many of the problems in IT environments seem to stem from over-specialisation and the barriers to communication and action that creates.
The problem is that the structure of IT departments as well as frameworks such as ITIL work to create a trend toward ever increasing specialisation. In the meantime, any young ITer wanting to maintain general skills finds themselves pushed into management (the curse ;-)).
Marc, I think that Cisco risk exactly the same thing which IBM inflicted upon themselves. I hope that they learn have learnt the lessons of the past and realise that this vision cannot be properly realised without co-opetition.
Cisco’s vision has some very interesting implications for IT departments; for example, many IT shops have out-sourced single disciplines; the out-sourcing of the network being one of the more popular functions to outsource. This all-embracing unifying strategy certainly challenges this approach.
Matt, how I resemble that comment. The generalist is much under-valued but we need more of them. Virtualisation should be the driving force behind this.
Good post Martin, I think its very early days for Cisco, this is release one remember….look at early releases in most server tech and its very slow on uptake think P Class Blade, the laughable “Virtualisation” machine from Dell the VESO.
I do like the approach though, it brings many questions into the fold on roles and responsibility and its about bloody time I say, too much turf war and pockets of specialists worrying about delivering rather than adopting open teamwork to deliver effectively (and cheaply) to the business.
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