Acadia: Discontinued SUV or Vehicle for Cisco's Success?

Now that the marketing dust is beginning to settle, we can take a closer look at Acadia, the new JV from Cisco, EMC and VMware - analyzing the move and what it really is/means. There seem to be 3 major objectives to the strategy:

1. Accelerate mainstreaming of the unified computing market & adoption of hardware from the respective players, taking advantage of the relative weaknesses of HP, IBM and Dell who haven't a credible response.
2. Align the otherwise independent Integrators (Accenture, TATA, etc) against EDS (HP), Perot (Dell) and IBM.
3. Create a vehicle (the JV) to recognize, separate and share revenues that come from Acadia.

I’ll address each of these points in separate blogs, starting with the first point in this posting, and then summarize the series with the last.

Point one is as obvious as you might guess. Cisco UCS is so darn complex to design, implement and support that the channel is rejecting it. No channel support means revenues won’t scale quickly. Since Cisco doesn’t have time to wait for the channel to ‘get it’, Acadia is going to step in and do all the designing, implementating and servicing of UCS sales. This will effectively make value added resellers more like sales agents. The launch offerings seem to embrace the notion that the channel needs easier solutions too. Did you notice that the difference between all of those Vblock configurations was essentially the size of the associated EMC storage?

Resellers thrive on the professional services associated with hardware sales, so I’m pretty darn sure that they’re not going to see the Acadia offerings as very friendly to their business. Apparently, having taken on HP and IBM for servers isn’t enough for Cisco. Now they want to take on all of the resellers too!

Our approach at Liquid is to deliver products that are based on OPEN architectures, can FLEXIBLY accommodate virtualized or bare metal environments, and are EASY to implement by end-users and the channel. Liquid Elements is a great example: Intel servers and NetApp storage tied together by a few cables and our software fabric & switch.

Good luck with that other approach guys!

Yankee Group: Cisco's in the Cross Hairs

Zeus Kerravala wrote an analysis of Cisco's current corporate challanges. It's a solid piece of work and he's pretty much spot on...and while Cisco's marketing may project a strong front, they know it too.

That said, I do challenge the notion that Cisco's has the demonstrated ability to create anything of core value "in-house" (i.e. not an add-on), and Cisco UCS is no exception. According to the company's releases, the final cost of purchasing Nuova Systems - the company that created Cisco UCS - will be nearly $700M if revenue ramp milestones set for the former Nuova team are achieved. When you add in the numbers that Cisco revealed for the development of the associated Nexus switch components, the total can come close to a staggering $1B. You can read more about this here.

I'd also say that Cisco's as much in the cross hairs these days of big competitors (as you've described) as they are new, agile and focused companies like Liquid Computing - whose products are much more advanced, mature and open to standards but lack comparative marketing and distribution heft. A perfect storm for Cisco would be the rise of a partnership between one or more of these younger players with a big Cisco foe. Timothy Pricket Morgan of The Register wrote a great article last week exactly on this subject.

From Titan to Titanic

Eighteen years ago, I led a team from MCI Telecommunications that replaced NASDAQ's networked trading infrastructure. At the time, we chose technology from a scrappy upstart by the name of Cisco over alternatives from big "safe" companies like IBM and DEC. We were impressed by their vision, organizational agility and customer focus - a perfect foil to the titanic bureaucracy, arrogance and indecisiveness of the big companies who sought to slow progress through marketing while mandating standards as a means of control.

Based on an article in today's WSJ ("Seeking Growth, Cisco Reroutes Decisions"), yesterday's DEC is apparently today's Cisco. "Mr. Chambers has replaced Cisco's top-down decision making with committees of executives from across the company. In total, Cisco now has 59 internal standing committees". Products such as UCS are reflective of this monolithic structure - rushed to market half baked last March in one of the biggest and most expensive product announcements in Cisco's history. Why? To forestall customers from moving to smaller, more nimble competitors whose products were fully available, based on open standards, and delivering measurable value.

The good news is that customers - and resellers - eventually figure out the difference between hype and reality, and that there's only a one letter difference between scrappy and...

Blogger Trained by Cisco Reveals UCS Facts

Scott Lowe, self-described in his blog as a technical lead specializing in virtualization and virtualization technologies for a national VAR/reseller, has been attending Cisco UCS training this week in San Jose. Scott's recent postings reveal some of the significant differences and deficiencies between Cisco marketing and actual product capabilities that exists.

Unfortunately, the story of Scott's blog was picked up and published by a major periodical, and as a result I don't expect additional candid commentary to appear throughout the rest of the training class, but what we have learned so far is important to anyone interested in the facts (all exerpts from Scott's blogs):

1. Cisco's half-width blades don’t use Cisco’s advanced memory technologies and, therefore, will suffer from the same drop in memory transaction speed (MTS) as DIMM slots are populated—just like any other vendors’ Xeon 5500-based servers.


2. Customers must buy RAM and disks for the B-series blades (and I would assume the C-series rack mount servers) from Cisco. There will be no support from TAC otherwise.


3. Even if you have an FCoE-capable storage array and you have FCoE converged network adapters (CNAs), you still can’t build an end-to-end FCoE solution. Why? Because you must put a standard Fibre Channel switch into the mix in order to provide fabric services like zoning, etc., because equipment like the UCS 6100 fabric interconnects and the Nexus 5000 don’t provide those services.

Thanks for the facts Scott, and I sure do hope that Cisco doesn't make you stop sharing your training with the rest of us!

HP & Cisco Battle for #2

It took a little while for calmer minds to prevail, however, the past few weeks have finally witnessed a return to common sense amongst reporters, analysts and prospective users of unified computing solutions. It’s as if the magical marketing dust sprinkled by the big players finally wore off, and everyone began to see the purported solutions for what they really are: full of warts and not quite baked. In fact, the only standards-based unified computing solution in production today as verified by announced commercial customers doesn’t even come from HP or Cisco but rather from Liquid Computing. This reality has left the two big players to battle one another for second place, and the mudslinging has started. Let’s take a look at some interesting recent events.

You all know how passionate I am when it comes to the issue of security. By removing the walls that separate servers, storage and switching you open the entire system up to a new generation of security concerns that cannot be resolved using traditional methods. HP seems to agree, since they quoted me and Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala as experts in their recent article (“One Giant Switch”), which exposes the holes in Cisco’s UCS product. Of course, the blogosphere’s reaction is that HP’s solution is no less problematic or complex since it’s based on old technology.

Next, I really have to salute Dan Kusnetsky of The 451 Group and ZDNet for going the extra mile for his blog to try and find a real, live production Cisco UCS customer with whom to speak with. You may recall that John Chambers proudly rolled out Savvis as an initial UCS beta customer. Well, that’s who Dan went to. The final paragraph of the interview ­­­sums it all up: “You’ll note that Bryan (Doerr) always spoke about Cisco’s UCS as something for the future. This is because the first few configurations have only recently been announced and are not in use in enough places for a datacenter’s manager to have full confidence in them. Cisco’s competitors, on the other hand, have years of experience in the field”.

Bravo Dan!

Red Alert: Cisco IOS is (still) Vulnerable to Hackers

In 2005 when I was CEO of web application security vendor Kavado, Cisco revealed a security vulnerability in their operating system (IOS) that could allow a hacker to take control of any product running IOS where web management was turned on. The attacker didn’t even need direct access to the server; just the IP of the target device. For example, using a now well known technique called cross site scripting, a hacker could inject random code into the Cisco device via its web interface, and then reset the password to gain full administrative privileges. That means that the hacker controls that device, and soon your entire network. Today, four years later, Cisco revealed that this vulnerability still exists. Apparently security isn’t that important to Cisco as a switching company – besides, the firewall will protect you, right? Oh yeah, if it’s a Cisco firewall it runs IOS too.

Now imagine that you’ve bet the farm on Cisco and have deployed their Unified Computing Solution – with management controlled dependent upon (yes, you guessed it) – IOS. That’s right, not only have you exposed all of your networking devices, but now because the manager for the entire system that controls visibility and access to your Cisco servers and FCoE storage is on an IOS powered switch, you’ve lost control over your entire data center. A hacker could potentially start re-directing corporate data somewhere else, or minimally wreak havoc by turning applications on and off.

Time to pack up and go home, because your days of gainful employment are over!

You don’t have to put all of your eggs into one vendor’s basket, and there’s no call to compromise on security. There are providers that deliver a complete and secure standards based solution without locking you into proprietary schemes. In fact, companies like Virtuoso have proven out the dramatic and immediate game changing benefits of unified computing solutions. However, one must be certain that the selected unified computing solution is complete. It should employ a secure method that physically isolates the command and control structure managing the compute, networking and storage elements from the operating system(s), virtualized environment(s) and associated applications. This requires an entirely different “from the ground-up” architecture versus the patch work approach or bundles of existing parts and professional services offered by the big switch and server vendors. Beware, buying “big” doesn’t mean buying smart.

Just last month, I discussed the ramifications of security in a unified computing world with Chris Preimesberger of eWeek. Reportedly, Cisco’s response to Chris when he asked them about the glaring lack of a security strategy was: “…in a UCS deployment, customers are expected to use their own existing server, storage and management security vendor—not one provided by Cisco itself”.

That says it all.

Add Liquid & Stir

You may have noticed that relationships amongst IT vendors are really stirred up. Companies who were formerly "close collaborators" are now quietly aligning themselves for direct battle. Some attribute this to Cisco's entry into the server space while others believe that it's due to a larger need for vendors to expand their addressable markets into adjoining areas in pursuit of continued growth. I believe that both of these are actually symptoms of a more fundamental and quite logical next step in the evolution to the dynamic data center.

IT vendors have been pitching the concept of "dynamic" or "agile" data center for years, but delivering on the vision on piece meal basis. In almost every instance, solutions essentially introduced software based control over a very specific sub-set of data center operations. Enough to make a targeted difference but not enough to solve the overall problem. For example, Layer 4-7 application switches (i.e. load balancers) delivered the ability to quickly re-route traffic destined for one server group located within a specific data center to another server group that could be located in a different data center - all based on based on server availability. But when you think about it, this approach relies upon the need to have alternate completely pre-configured data center resources (well beyond the receiving servers) ready and waiting to be called into action. So, the switching of the inbound traffic is dynamic but really worthless to you unless you have the rest of the underlying IT infrastructure waiting for it. Can you imagine how many dollars are wasted annually (real estate, power, professional services, equipment, etc) on these partial solutions? Very inefficient, expensive and truly manual.

The ideal approach is one in which all underlying physical IT data center resources and their interdependency's can be manipulated via software as building blocks, and the system itself can autonomically provision and/or reconfigure itself in response to corporate policy and real-time business needs. No more overbuilding, lots of corporate savings and most importantly dramatic increases in customer satisfaction.

The recognized power of this approach is the real underlying cause for all the vendor stir. If you dig a bit further, you'll discover a lot of buzz centered on Liquid Computing. Liquid has this powerful software based approach available today while everyone else is just starting to think about. That's why I say, add Liquid and stir.