It’s been an interesting 2 years, and a milestone for many – we’re coming up on the 2 year anniversary of the Cisco UCS FCS, which will formally be on June the 20th.
I remember it like it was yesterday. It was the early part of 2009 when I was pulled into a series of meetings with Soni, Ed, Prem, Luca, Mario and a small set of others who were part of the Nuova Systems startup (spin-out/spin-in) that developed the Unified Compute System. That first meeting led to many others (see my notes on one of those trips here)
There were really two things that stood out in that first meeting:
- The product itself was pretty cool. The way they tightly coupled the server to the network, and a focus on “carrier-like” management models was very funky. The memory expansion was also neat, but the “make it really easy to manage in a stateless way at scale” was the standout to me. The hardware was also swank in the sense that I loved that the blade chassis was in essence a dumb part.
- This was going to trigger all out war in the industry :-)
A lot of people were confused by that second point. I heard several customers say “why couldn’t the status quo of me using HP for servers, Cisco for networking stay?”.
The answer is that it was inevitable. Sometimes in our day-to-day heads-down activities, we miss the “big picture”. The “big picture” on this front is that “traditional” servers, network, and storage continue to be commoditized every day. Virtualization and cloud are accelerants of this trend.
If you’re Cisco, HP, IBM, EMC, or other big players – you see this as an existential threat to your existing revenue streams and business models. At the same time, it’s a huge opportunity if you can rally around it.
There are a couple ways to try to rally:
- The path EMC is taking: i) try to make your great, successful and existing cash cow products like VNX and VMAX adapt rapidly to fit the new trend – a huge task; ii) while simultaneously investing in organic and inorganic innovation in the adjacent markets – like Greenplum, VMware, Isilon and others); iii) expanding into different go-to-markets like SMB and service providers.
- The path others are taking (and EMC is also participating in through the VCE Joint Venture) is to embrace the commoditization of the components by offering highly integrated stacks. UCS is in a way a great manifestation of that idea, as it integrates directly two of the stack components (servers and network), and you can see that Cisco’s recent acquisitions of Tidal and Newscale highlight that Cisco continues down that path.
The virtualization and cloud waves are industry-level forces (like the shift to x86 and away from RISC, or towards ethernet for everything) that are bigger than the giants (including EMC, Cisco, HP and others). As large as we are – if you don’t surf these waves, they crush you.
If you think HP wasn’t going to ramp up their core switching/routing business and go after Cisco’s bread and butter, you’re perhaps being naïve.
So, with all of that said, in the early days, the big server vendors marginalized Cisco UCS in the field saying (I literally heard this with customers) “they weren’t serious about the server market”… I remember thinking to myself: “wow, you can say a lot, but that one doesn’t make sense to me – they are clearly DEAD serious about it”.
So – 2 years later, Cisco is now officially (according to IDC), the #3 player in the blade market.
Anecdotally, many, many customers I talk to have UCS – in fact, north of 30% of the customers I engage with have some. We have many customers (hundreds of Vblock, many many more of UCS with EMC in the traditional mix/match model).
UPDATED May 31st, 2011, 2:52pm ET: I’ve had many readers ask me about my take on the C-series (rackmount). They have always been fine rackmount servers, but until recently not that differentiated from their peers. HOWEVER, with the addition of the ability to use virtualized adapters in the C-series, and manage them via UCS Manager, they have inherited a lot of the mojo from the B-series. My team uses C-Series servers extensively (they powered a lot of the Chad’s World Live demos at EMC World, and our mobile VMUG demo kit is all C-series. In Vblocks, they use C-series for the AMP modules (standalone management modules that run vCenter, remote management and other functions). I don’t see as much customer demand for them as I do the B-series, but frankly, think that’s as much because Cisco isn’t marketing/selling them as hard as they are the blades. I there are a ton of use cases for rackmount – particularly in embedded/OEM scenarioes (look at how Cisco can use them for Unified Communications as an example).
The voice of the customer matters most to me. Maple Leaf Foods. Alcon. Morris Hospital. Interestingly, all the 7 customers on stage at Chad’s World Live were joint Cisco/EMC customers – and almost all had, or were considering getting UCS. The common thread I hear from customers:
- UCS is simple.
- The integrated network/server idea WORKS – in every way.
- UCS performs very well.
- UCS is a rock.
- In spite of the FUD we’ve heard, UCS is less expensive than we expected, and is MORE than competitive.
Congrats Cisco! While there’s a lot of continuous adaptation needed (for the big and the small) to survive and thrive (and yes, those changes can be scary and involve some pain) look at the results from the innovation that was and is Cisco UCS for inspiration of what future days at Cisco can bring!
BTW – while I’m mostly focused on VMware, it’s inevitable that I spend a ton of time with Cisco. We’ve done a lot together, and will do more in the future. A couple examples below: 1) a fun video from EMC World; 2)The Cisco write up of EMC as a customer using UCS for our most mission-critical workloads – yup we both use each other’s stuff very extensively; 3) a Cisco Validated Design (because not everyone wants the “product” that is Vblock, some want a recipe and make their own) around Cisco’s VXI initiative.
You can expect to see more, and more, and more down these fronts in the years to come.
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