Back in 2009, there was a lot of speculation about Cisco entering the data center server market with a new effort codenamed Project California. The California server was officially revealed in March of 2009 as the Unified Computing System (UCS).
Now two and half years later, Cisco is claiming a major milestone has been achieved with UCS. According to Cisco, they now have 10,000 customers running UCS servers and the product portfolio is generating an annual run rate of $1.1 billion in revenues for the company. On top of that, Cisco has gone from not being a server player, to holding down the number three spot globally, ahead of Dell and behind HP and IBM.
The UCS integrates server with networking technology to help deliver an integrated platform that delivers better scale and performance. The platform initially began with the b-series blade servers and then expanded with the c-series rack mounted servers. Todd Brannon, product marketing manager at Cisco told InternetNews.com that Cisco is currently selling more of the b-series blade servers than the c-series. That said, he noted that in 2011, Cisco fully integrated the c-series into the UCS Manager environment, which makes it easier for data center administrators to manage both c and b series devices. As such, Brannon, noted that c-series sales are picking up now as well.
In terms of customer mix, Brannon noted that nearly all UCS customers were already existing Cisco customers.
“With the footprint that Cisco has in switching, it’s nearly impossible to find a server customer that doesn’t have a Cisco switch somewhere in their environment,” Brannon said.
Read the full story at EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet:
Cisco Hits UCS Milestone
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist
