Analysis: Dell's data center play will meet new opposition from Cisco's system

Today's big data center announcements from Dell may have been expedited just a tad by Cisco, which stirred up interest last week after having unveiled its very first Unified Computing System. In an environment where other big companies are scaling back, Cisco is building on two fronts, the other one being the acquisition -- also last week -- of pocket camcorder maker Flip Video.

While switch-maker Cisco is a newcomer to data center servers, Dell already places third in the overall blade server rankings with a 9% market share, according to analyst group IDC. But although much less so than Cisco, Dell still has a long way to go to catch up with market leader Hewlett-Packard with its 58% share, and IBM with 22%.

Unlike Dell or any other incumbent vendor, Cisco has adopted the approach of building the storage fabric directly into the blade server, noted Gartner Group analysts.

"Cisco is attempting to use virtualization to break up the traditional server architecture by recombining it with networking technologies," according to a recent Gartner report. "Cisco is differentiating itself in the systems market space, with a blade server and fabric interconnect as a single integrated management domain."

"It's the fact that UCS was launched as a system," elaborated Philip Dawson, a Gartner analyst. Cisco's "whole focus is on bringing all the components together as a system for virtualization," Dawson told Betanews.

As delineated by Gartner, components in Cisco's system include UCS Management, for integrated physical device management; fabric interconnect and fabric extenders for 10-gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel-over-Ethernet (FCoE) with extension capabilities; blade servers and enclosures for energy efficiency and memory expansion for workloads; and virtual adapters for both network interface controllers (NICs) and virtual host bus adapters (HBAs).

"There's a philosophical difference, and it's fairly substantial," concurred Charles King, principal analyst for Pund-IT, speaking with Betanews. "But what kind of success Cisco will achieve is uncertain right now."

Yet while Cisco's strategy is unprecedented, it's a more conservative choice than an alternative approach Cisco might have taken, Dawson said.

"Cisco could have been disruptive and revolutionary as a fabric vendor. Instead, they launched an evolution [around] blade servers, an ambitious but [safer] bet," the Gartner analyst said.