Cisco's Blade System Will 'Shake Up Market' - Page 2

The UCS technology breaks from Cisco tradition in that it uses a fair amount of industry standard features. Cisco has traditionally made its own chips, but for the blades, it uses Intel's Nehalem processor, DDR3 memory, standard drive interfaces and the PCI Express.

In addition to the standard parts, Malagrino said Cisco adds the embedded OS to boot and provision the blades, and some memory expansion chips to handle all the memory on the blades. Cisco plans to disclose further details later.

Don't call it a blade

During the announcement, Cisco went out of its way to avoid product specifics and didn't make any product declarations. At the same time, it had a long list of partners it said were vital to launch such an endeavor. But notable by their absence were longtime Cisco partners IBM, HP and Dell, the top three blade makers.

"You can think of this as a blade or a network. It will be shipped as a system and deployed as a system," said Rob Lloyd, senior vice president of U.S., Canada and Japan operations at Cisco. "That's why we don't think we are competing on a blade platform but on a new form factor to enable our customers to deploy quickly."

"Call it what you want, it's still going to shake up the blade market," said Liam McGlynn, senior analyst for systems management at Enterprise Management Associates. "They're going to drastically reduce the amount of cabling, they're going to simplify the network, and make it easier to provision virtual images," he told InternetNews.com.

Where Cisco is really going to win is making the datacenter much denser and at the same time, making it much easier to manage. "If they don't fall down hard and make some huge mistake, I think they are going to capture the number four spot if not the number three spot within a year," said McGlynn.

"They are taking a position in blade servers, doing something really unique to give IT management a really good reason to consider them," he added. "If you are looking at a blade server, are you not going to allow Cisco to do an RFP? Of course you are. Cisco will get in on every blade server RFP in the Fortune 500/Fortune 1000, and Cisco has one of the best marketing departments of any technology firm."

Cisco said it will provide further technical details and pricing in the second calendar quarter of this year when the UCS is expected to be available.