Executives from BMC Software had good reason to look cheerful when Cisco set out its strategy on Monday to change the face of datacentres.
Texan software provider BMC has just become the exclusive partner for systems-management tools in the Unified Computing System, Cisco's mission to transform the way large-scale IT environments are created and operate.
Cisco's vision is for a cohesive, end-to-end architecture for datacentres, built around its products and those of its chosen technology partners. Networking specialist Cisco has even launched its first server, a blade, as part of the effort. Its Unified Computing initiative covers computing, virtualisation, networking, storage access and management software — which is where BMC comes in.
ZDNet UK talked to Jim Grant, BMC's senior vice president for strategy, to find out what the agreement with Cisco would mean for his company and how he thinks it could benefit companies with their IT strategies.
Q: Some people are suggesting there is nothing new in Cisco's announcement — would you agree?
A: There has been criticism from HP. It said something like: "What Cisco wants to deliver is something we are delivering now". My first thought when I heard that was they fundamentally misunderstand what is being done here.
But isn't HP just saying that it is doing a lot of work on improving the management of computers?
They don't understand that this is not just about taking a computer and a network and putting it all in a box. [What Cisco announced] was a fundamental redesign of how we do computing. There are so many things in the Cisco announcement.
First, there are so many partners involved in this — and companies that are involved in the open-systems arena, BMC being one, Red Hat, Novell, Intel, SAP, Oracle and so on. And so many people have endorsed this. You also have an endorsement of what an open-systems approach is. You also have the theme of organisations saying they don't want to be constantly reconfiguring their infrastructure.
So this thing attacks the problem from both sides. It is a standards-based, blade-based, Intel-based architecture for computing. It also fundamentally takes all the labours and complexity out of the back-end of a system.
So configuring and reconfiguring, or running a new virtual language, are all managed while the complexity remains behind the scenes. These processes are essentially managed intelligently by the box itself and by the management software from BMC.
This initiative involves VMware as well?
This machine, slash network, slash computer, was designed with virtualisation in mind and with the idea that you would be able to rapidly provision new computer images. That is, commission them, provision them, run them, all in very rapid order without taking great risk.
HP would say it is all about the management software and that it is always improving that software, and in fact introduced many improvements recently.
True, but you can't change the physical architecture that HP delivers, which is a separate computer and a separate network that have to be plugged together as separate components. What Cisco says is simply the computer is the easiest part of this — it is a commodity. The harder part is how it interfaces to the network.
With a standard HP, IBM or Dell blade farm, what you find behind the computers is a mass of wiring. Now, walk behind a Cisco 'California' [code name for Cisco's new system], what you have is one wire in, one wire out. Storage, network — as many versions of those as you want — all configured in an object manager onboard. Now that is not something HP has.
It is really compelling when you see that what Cisco has done is realise that all this hardware can be made virtual and by doing so we take the labour and the risk out.
What is BMC's part in all this?
The way this breaks down is that Cisco has designed a management architecture for the device that manages from the computer down into the hardware, the network interface, the storage interface and so on.
BMC manages everything above that, such as the operating system, the application images and the configuration management.
So the Cisco UCSM [Unified Computing System Manager] delivers to the BMC software a hardware profile that describes...
