March 17, 2009

In a much-anticipated announcement, Cisco Systems Monday launched its Unified Computing System, comprising virtualization technology, services and blade servers aimed at helping enterprises develop and manage what it calls "next-generation data centers.

Cisco's new data-center architecture comprises compute, network, storage access and virtualization resources in a single rackable system designed to cut IT infrastructure costs and complexity, stretch existing IT investments and allow enterprise customers to build an agile data center that they can easily extend for future growth, according to the company.

Taking a step into the server market, where it will compete with long-standing partners like Hewlett-Packard and IBM, Cisco announced the UCS B-Series blades, based on upcoming Intel Nehalem processors. Cisco said the blades incorporate extended memory technology for applications with large data sets.

However, Cisco also is teaming up with software partners such as Microsoft, VMware and BMC to provide technology for its new system. Cisco will prepackage, resell and support Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V technology and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 as part of the Unified Computing System. For its part, VMware is providing virtualization technology to the new system and BMC is contributing resource-management software.

Systems integrator Accenture has already signed on to be a services partner, introducing on Monday four services options for its customers to deploy the Unified Computing System. Cisco also is inviting its broad network of channel partners to work with the company to provide the new infrastructure to enterprise customers.

Prior to Monday's announcement, Cisco had laid out its intention to eliminate the manual integration of computing and storage platforms with networks and virtualization systems. In a recent blog posting, CTO Padmasree Warrior acknowledged this will lead Cisco to compete with some of its partners