VMware Biggest Winner In Cisco Server Launch
The partnership isn't exclusive, however, as Cisco said its UCS hardware will be able to run Citrix Systems or Microsoft hypervisors as well.
By W. David Gardner
InformationWeek
March 18, 2009 06:15 PM
Cisco (NSDQ: CSCO)'s Unified Computing System
(click for larger image)
Cisco may have made headlines this week with the debut of its first computer server for data centers, but it's EMC's VMware unit that made out like gangbusters.
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Saylent says its analytics software helps financial clients keep up with a 30% annual growth rate in debit card accounts, even from non-established institutions. The announcement -- previously called "California" -- was the internal code name for a joint Cisco-EMC project. The first big result of the project is Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS), which ties together network management, virtualization, and storage in a blade-server form factor.
With VMware as the key connective tissue between Cisco and EMC, a steady flow of cooperative products and services are expected to be announced in coming weeks and months. The partnership isn't exclusive, however, as Cisco said its UCS hardware will be able to run Citrix Systems or Microsoft hypervisors as well.
While EMC (NYSE: EMC) and Cisco have cooperated for years, the two companies became serious partners in July 2007, when Cisco invested $150 million in VMware before the software virtualization company launched its IPO. In an interview Wednesday, EMC's Chris Gahagan, senior VP of resource management, said EMC's and Cisco's virtualization drive will create "private clouds" for data centers and enterprise installations.
"It's really about how you want to run your data center," said Gahagan who argued that virtualization as presented in UCS will pretty much eliminate the need to redo software applications. "The challenge is whether you have to rewrite all your applications. Now with Cisco's UCS you get what looks like a virtual computer. The power of this whole thing is that customers don't have to rewrite their applications."
Gahagan said the aggressive new move by Cisco (NSDQ: CSCO) into data centers will open new opportunities for both firms as well as for customers and he indicated EMC (NYSE: EMC) will be unveiling important updates and products in its storage and security units in particular to complement UCS. By working together on the California project for more than a year, VMware has a jump on competition because it has already modified its virtual switch software to take advantage of UCS.
"You'll see EMC and Cisco sales people going arm-in-arm to data centers," said Gahagan, optimistic over the sales possibilities for EMC's flagship virtualized storage business and for its RSA security division. "Security will be huge, too."
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Saylent says its analytics software helps financial clients keep up with a 30% annual growth rate in debit card accounts, even from non-established institutions. Already working together on storage area networking through their OEM agreement in which EMC has been reselling Cisco MDS multilayer switches and Cisco Nexus 5000 platform products, EMC has offered the Cisco products in its Connectrix line of connectivity products. Through that deal, EMC has been offering Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) switches based on the Cisco Nexus platform.
Gahagan traces the history of data centers from mainframes to Unix servers to database-oriented computing to Web 2.0 to cloud computing to where he sees data centers now moving: to private cloud computing. (VMware has its vCloud API in Beta release to take advantage of the phenomenon.) Gahagan predicts there will be more private cloud applications that enable IT managers to transport their private cloud applications between and among other cloud installations, but managed from a single point.
Management tools, said Gahagan, have to be "in lockstep" with the accelerating developments in the movement to private clouds, which are sometimes called "internal clouds." As examples of these IT resource management tools, which are automated, he pointed to EMC Smarts and EMC ControlCenter. For instance, in the latest version of Smarts -- announced last week -- the Smarts Server Manager removes much of the mystery surrounding initially inexplicable data center difficulties by automatically pinpointing root-cause problems in virtualized configurations. The latest version digs through virtual servers, physical servers, storage, networks, and application software to find trouble spots so they can be quickly fixed.
Cisco and EMC including VMware are building a "solutions lab" to develop solutions for emerging data center challenges. In IT resource management, they will "focus on discovery and dependency mapping" and "policy-based configuration management" while at the same time updating automated root cause analysis, EMC said this week. |
