Thoughts on Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS)

Posted by Brian Gracely - Manager, Virtualization Architecture and Marketing

Sitting here thinking about today's Unified Computing System (UCS) announcement by Cisco, I can't help but wonder where this is going to take the IT industry and why so many people are being myopic about it's impact. So I started jotting down some thoughts on where this could go.

Near Term - It's about Consolidation
1 - Entry into the computing market - New revenue streams for Cisco.
2 - Entry into the computing market - Simplify deployments for IT Admins, especially as virtualization changes everything.
3 - Entry into the computing market - Force customers and vendors/partners to start thinking about what could happen to their IT infrastructure if yesterday's physical barriers were removed.

Mid-Term - It's about Productivity
1 - New touch points into data traffic - Ability to enhance and coordinate new services within the network, with the network being the fabric to interconnect the value of those new services.
2 - Re-evaluation of business structures - As lines between IT functions continue to blur because of virtualization, shared resources and cloud architectures, do the old alignments of IT <-> Business functions still make sense? Are they still optimal?
3 - New touch points into business enablement -
(a) new focus on the protocols and architecture required to bridge internal & external clouds,
(b) redefine business resilience via new approaches to workload and application mobility,
(c) greater insight into how applications are delivered to next-generation mobile and social environments.

Long-Term - It's about Business Change
1 - If a company wants to do a merger, how much time does it take to deal with IT integration? How much do those delays impact the value of the deal? Would Unified Computing be able to reduce that time by 50%, since it'll enable virtualization and mobility?
2 - If a company needs to significantly change their IT focus from month to month (ie. order taking near Christmas; video delivery for a SuperBowl ad in February), would Unified Computing enable this to move faster through the transitions?
3 - With the next generation of the workforce (Gen Y) moving into companies now, and expecting ideas at Facebook/Twitter speed, is your infrastructure ready to move on a great idea that could radically change your business differentiation?

The picture to the right (click on it for better visibility) is a graph I've used many times in the past to show how Cisco has used new-market entry products to created an eco-system of services to enhance the value of their new technology offerings. In each case, it followed a technology lull and took the value for customers to a completely new level (productivity, integration, new services never before through of). UCS has the opportunity to be another one of those Disruptive Innovation game changers. It will allow people to start asking themselves why they need to deploy separate Search infrastructures on top of their data infrastructure. It will allow people to ask why they would deploy separate Social Network tools in the Enterprise, when the network has the touch-points into Unified Communications, Storage and other areas to allow it to create Dynamic Social Communities (internal, partners, etc.). It will allow a whole new set of "what if?" conversations, which is always good for companies willing to leverage new innovation to give them a competitive advantage.

So while a number of people (bloggers, media, vendors) will talk about this being "just another blade server", I think the right thing to do is look at how it changes the value proposition for customers over the various time cycles. Just like some people dismissed the iPhone as "yet another smart phone", the bigger thinkers now understand that it was the introduction to the future of mobile computing. I have a feeling that UCS will be the beginning of a new round of thinking about Next-Generation Data Centers.

We're excited about our continued partnership with Cisco, and look forward to helping them bring this new era of Data Center enablement to our customers around the world.

Follow me on Twitter, bgracely

Comments

[Sal Collora]

Brian,

I have presented this system to several customers, and they overwhelmingly understand the impact. The key is to not try and position UCS as a blade server. It's almost a shame that the first generation comes in this form factor. What most customers understand is the simplicity of it all. The simplicity of the hardware, the adapters, and the management. You're dead on: the first step is consolidation and virtualization of the hardware.

The second step is anyone's best guess. Undoubted, there will be ISVs that provide automation services for the platform that can drive the kind of change you reference.

Sal Collora
Cisco Systems

[Omar Sultan]

Brian:

Some great noodling here. As I have mentioned before, when folks see "unified computing", they obsess about the "computing" part and ignore the "unified" part. I think once folks have an oppty to digest the true impact of this, it will help folks to start adjusting their perspectives on what is possible.

Omar Sultan
Cisco