It may not have made the front page because it came out on Tuesday when there was another news event that overshadowed it, but the New York Times had some big news in IT anyway – Cisco is moving into the server market.
The philosophy of the move comes down to an industry idea that with advances in virtualization technology, the data center is becoming a “single entity” rather than separate units. The demand for networking equipment might very well be reduced if you could run all of your enterprise’s servers from one or two ultra-powerful mainframes.
If this is inevitability, naturally, Cisco would like to have a piece of the market here.
“Our vision is, how do we virtualize the entire data center?” Ms. Warrior said. “It is not about a single product. We will have a series of products that enable us to make that transition.”
This has put Cisco at odds with traditional server manufacturers, of course.
So the question becomes, is the innovation going to come from the traditional server providers where networking capabilities are just another feature, or has the traditional server been so commoditized that it makes more sense to add it to the multipurpose firewall/router/floorwax/dessert-topping network gear? While servers and routers are already becoming commodities, which one will be driven even further down that commodity slope?
While Cisco may be concerned with network/server infrastructure, it’s also important to consider the impact on network/server management. If the servers and networking – from whatever angle – are becoming one, shouldn’t it be time to dissolve the barriers between network and server IT?
I don’t know the answer to these questions, and I’m hoping that if you have any insight – from Cisco, from HP, from IBM, from EMC, from VMWare, or even from Apple (hey, they have a server too!) – that you’d be happy to share it with us.
The one question that’s REALLY bothering me? How will the virtualized data center affect network performance? It’s hard enough for a “mostly liberal arts” geek like me to calculate theoretical latency between WAN endpoints. (That’s why we have a calculator.)
Are you telling me I’m going to have to learn Big O notation too?
This post was compiled with research and insight from Ben Erwin and Patrick Ancipink.
No comments yet.