…the issue from a storage angle. Meanwhile, Cisco sees the intelligent network, with its Nexus 7000 sitting in the centre, as the best answer for virtualising the data centre.
That said, getting customers to buy into Cisco's vision won't necessarily be easy. Transforming how the data centre is designed is likely to pit Cisco against some of its biggest and most powerful partners, including IBM and HP.
"Cisco is heading into a new competitive landscape," Kerravala said. "They no longer are competing against 3Com or Nortel Networks. They will be competing with IBM and HP, who have been their partners. And that is difficult to do."
But Kerravala believes Cisco's approach gives it an edge over potential competitors. For one, Cisco has been good in the past at picking out market transitions and executing on those trends. The company began focusing on the data centre several years ago and has slowly built a portfolio of products that includes storage area networking equipment, virtualisation software and wide area optimisation technology. What's more, its traditional switching and routing products fit nicely into the portfolio. The Nexus 7000 switch will help unify this strategy.
Secondly, Cisco's core competency in networking is well suited for the virtualisation revolution, Kerravala said. As more computing resources like memory and storage are pooled together, these devices will have to be connected through a network. And adding intelligence to that network to use resources in a more efficient manner is likely to become important.
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Convincing customers that its vision of the data centre is the right approach is crucial to Cisco's enterprise business, not only because it will generate new revenue for the company but because it will also help add value to its existing routing and switching business. The reason is simple. If Cisco can make the network a valuable asset, it can continue to sell its routing and switching gear in other parts of the network at high profit margins. It also gives Cisco more influence in the executive suite, where it can help steer corporate spending towards its own products.
"Cisco has always been an important supplier to large companies," Taneja said. "But this would take them to a higher plane. They would become the dead centre of the strategic partnership."
Talkback
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High quality? The Nexus is a new technology for the core data center, with new hardware and a new unproven OS. And it doesn’t even support Fibre Channel?
High performance? Look again. One slot has a max I/O of 230 Gb/s and with 10 slots per shelf, my math says 2.3 Tb/s is the real capacity. And it’s an energy hog in spite of Cisco’s claims to the contrary.
High reliability for data center applications? Wrong again. It takes the Nexus 7000 4-5 seconds to recover from network failures (it doesn’t even support the much touted VSS capability). And no intelligent services virtualization and limited module options complicates real data center networks.
For more, see my Feb 13 blog at http://blog.tmcnet.com/the-hyperconnected-enterprise/