Roundup: Cisco's Unified Computing

InfoWorld has reaction from Dell and Brocade (BRCD): "Competitors lined up to dismiss the new technology, saying it raises the problem of vendor lock-in and is too limited in scope to address broad customer needs."

Network World's Cisco Subnet reports that Cisco considered using either HP or IBM gear, but said UCS required a tighter integration with the network fabric then their equipment could offer. Cisco marketing vice president David Lawler says UCS won't accept blade servers from other vendors, and Cisco's blade server won't work in any other vendors' data center consolidation platform. "Other vendors' solutions will not work because (UCS is) a single unified system," he says. "And we're not developing blades for other (vendors') platforms."

Given that position, eWeek notes a warning from HP about vendor lock-in. "Would you let a plumber build your house?" Jim Ganthier, HP's vice president of Infrastructure Software and Blades, told eWEEK. "Cisco's network-centric view of the data center is great for bandwidth management, but leaves a lot to chance in terms of service level delivery as well as data reliability and accessibility. The architecture does not unify management, but uses proprietary network-based management structure as the point of control. This is not 'unification,' this is a change of control."

While most of the pre-announcement chatter focused on Cisco's introduction of a blade server, the UCS launch was light on specifics and many analysts were left wanting to hear more.  "Cisco didn’t give out anything related to the processors or the memory available on the system, saying those details will emerge later this month from Intel," writes Stacey at GigaOm.

Cisco anticipated some of the areas of contention and confusion, and used a pre-announcement blog post from Doug Gourlay to massage the expectations a bit. The company has also published photos on Flickr and videos on YouTube as well as a Flash presentation on Cisco.com.