Juniper execs share network vision

Yen: Having come from the server world, UCS is just the next generation of blade servers. The vendors that reacted to the move were the server companies, IBM, HP, Dell. Cisco literally invaded their market. But instead of joining the very low margin X86 vendors and building conventional X86 servers, they carved out a portion of the network interface, a portion of the storage interface, and then adopted the latest Intel multicore, multithread microprocessor and, with their relationship with Intel, came up with an innovative approach to provide more memory on their blade, which is conducive to the number of virtual machines they can support. Then they laid in the VMware virtualization software and the BMC management software.It's a local scale system integration job. But by doing that integration, obviously, they eliminated some unnecessary hardware/software which reduces the total cost of such an aggregation. And with the reduction of that cost, they could give the customer half of the savings as an incentive and keep half of the saving to raise the margin.

So, it's an interesting move on their part. Unfortunately, they enter territory they don't really know that much about. Getting into servers is not just putting the hardware together, but most seriously, they are hurting their partnerships with those system companies.They claim their architecture will make it easier to marry network policies to mobile virtual machines.

Perdikou: That's marketing speech for a proprietary implementation. Today, every time Intel comes up with a new microprocessor, within a couple of weeks any customer can pick up the phone and get no less than six vendors to come in and bid, all with that latest microprocessor. Now, look at UCS. The next time Intel comes up with a new microprocessor the customer who adopted UCS has to sit there waiting for Cisco to come around to upgrade their system And when it comes to virtualization, there are multiple proposals right now in standards bodies trying to standardize the virtual machine-to-networking interface, including what kind of a state it has to carry when it migrates from one place to the other, in what format that state be carried, etc. It's a matter of standardization.

Once completed, even when the customer utilizes servers and network equipment from different vendors, the virtual machine should be able to migrate from one server to another server through various kinds of network equipment. It has nothing to do with integrating things together.

UCS is absolutely a lock-in strategy on Cisco's part. Because of my background, customers ask me for my opinion about UCS. And I say, "Well, if you are a small business and you believe for the lifetime of your business you can stay within the scope of UCS, then yes, Cisco has done the pre-integration with virtualization software, management software, did the pretesting, it's ready to go."