Is probably more important than what they did.

http://www.theapplicationdeliverynetwork.com/?p=201

Today, Cisco announced a new product that leverages network intelligence to provision resources together as virtualized services. This industry-first approach greatly reduces application deployment times, improves overall resource utilization, and offers greater business agility. Further, it includes an open API, and easily integrates with third party management applications, as well as best-of-breed server and storage virtualization offerings.

If this sounds like this weeks announcement by Cisco of their new Unified Computing System (UCS) you would be partially correct. The words in the above paragraph are basically the same as what was used this week at their announcement. However, the above words are actually what they used to describe their new VFrame Data Center 1.2 product when they announce it on July 24, 2007.

At that time, VFrame DC was touted as a key component for Cisco’s vision of next generation data centers, called Data Center 3.0.

However, this week during Cisco’s announcement of their Unified Computing System there was no mention of VFrame Data Center. Instead, they proclaimed that the next step in the Cisco Data Center 3.0 vision is their UCS.

No surprise then that it turns out that VFrame was quietly retired in February, less than 20 months after being announced by John Chambers at Cisco Live as a foundational element of Data Center 3.0.

So what does this mean to you? Well that brings me back to the title of this entry, “Strategic Means Being Steadfast”.

Cisco wants to be your strategic IT partner that you can now trust for all your data center needs. But do trusted partners abandon what they sell as cornerstone technology, with the result of abandoning customers such as you?

HP’s answer is an emphatic ‘no’.

An example: HP still enhances, still sells and still supports OpenVMS. In addition, OpenVMS is available on HP BladeSystem. Yet this is a product that was introduced in 1977, seven years before Cisco became a company.

Something to think about when you choose your strategic trusted IT partner.

Mike Kendall

Every time a competitor introduces a new product, we can't help but notice they suddenly get very interested in what HP is blogging during the weeks prior to their announcement.  Then when the competitor announces, the story is very self-congratulatory "we've figured out what the problem is with existing server and blade architectures".  The implication being that blades volume adoption is somehow being constrained by the very thing they have and everyone else is really stupid. 

HP BladeSystem growth has hardly been constrained; with quarterly growth rates of 60% or 80% and over a million BladeSystem servers sold.  So I have to wonder if maybe we already have figured out what many customers want - save time, power, and money in an integrated infrastructure that is easy to use, simple to implement changes, and can run nearly any workload.

Someone asked me today "will your strategy change?"  I guess given the success we've had, we'll keep focusing on the big problems of customers - time, cost, change and energy. It sounds boring, it doesn't get a lot of buzz and twitter traffic, but it's why customers are moving to blade architectures. 

Our platform was built and proven in a step-by-step approach: BladeSystem c-Class, Thermal Logic, Virtual Connect, Insight Dynamics, etc.  Rather than proclaim at each step that we've solved all the industry's problems or have sparked a social movement in computing; we'll continue to focus on doing our job to provide solutions that simply work for customers and tackle their biggest business and data center issues.

Rob Enderle recently added some great insight into a question we posed a couple of weeks ago, "What If a Plumber Built Your House".  When thinking about the question if you wanted a plubmer to build your house, he answered with "maybe".  Here are some of Rob's excellent points from his post, "Cisco, EMC and VMware: Cloud Computing Could Bring Strange Bedfellows".

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  Most builders learn the ropes in a specific trade like plumbing.


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  Plumbers can learn and partner.


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  Other experts may be useful if you were building with non-traditional materials in non-traditional places; like a cliff

Can a plumber learn new skills and partner with others to fill in the gaps?  Certainly.  Could a world-class builder do the same thing?  That is, continuously learn and partner to expand innovation in new areas based on a proven foundation.  Absolutely.

But when the example of the cloud came up, Rob inferred the cloud is primarily a network thing. Or at least a network, storage, virtual thing.  That's one point where we disagree.

The point between our builder versus plumber analogy is this: the only frame of reference when building a house is from the family and the people that make it up.  In the case of the next generation data center, that means the business and the applications and services it relies upon.  If everything isn't aligned, unified and integrated with those needs in mind for both today and the unknown tomorrow, it's a non-starter. 

Whether you are building a cloud, a data center, a or a tiny IT room, it's about about the business and delivering the application services the business needs - faster, cheaper and easier.  In our opinion, taking any kind of technology-centric view; network, server or storage is just the wrong approach.

This really just comes down to a simple difference in our points of view .  We view the big picture from the business and the application perspective across the data center, others see these as appendages hanging on to either side of a network cable.  

Rob ended with this.

"But the key to all of this is a general contractor that understands networking, storage and virtualization deeply, because those are likely the three critical skills in this new world order. By the way, this clearly suggests other partnerships, as well."

We agree it takes a lot to bring all the skills together to build in the world of the next generation data center.  Our team features EDS, who may be the world's greatest general contractor, HP software for the best home automation, and ProCurve might be your best bet for a plumber.  VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, Oracle and more are some of our most talented sub contractors too.  But without a builder, how do all the necessary parts of your data center work together and stay optimized; and who's accountable if they don't?

A big thanks to Rob for adding a lot of great ideas to consider in the "builder versus plumber" discussion.  What do you think?