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.

Which Fighter is right for you?

I’ve been on the road across the US and Europe for the past several weeks briefing major analyst groups (Yankee, IDC, 451, Gartner) and certain leading edge enterprise data center operators about the benefits of deploying a properly designed unified computing system. It turns out that several of these folks actually read this blog (gasp), and I was asked on more than one occasion to delve further into my opinions of the serious flaws and lack of execution that I see vacant in Cisco’s vision and HP’s releases. I (humbly) accommodated, but more importantly, seized the opportunity when I could to offer a demonstration of a live production UCS system so that I could show how these major oversights are the product of systems that “look like” UCS and in other cases fell short and could lead to security issues. It was priceless to see the facial reactions as they saw how through powerful software control, very complex data center environments (switching, computing, storage and all associated physical and logical connections) could be deployed at once - in minutes - and visualized in seconds. How virtualized environments and associated applications could be interchanged with entirely different bare metal environments and configurations at the touch of a software button, and how the entire standards based ecosystem was designed to defend itself from attack and self-heal. You could actually see the lights turn on in their heads as they realized that solutions marketed to them from the big infrastructure players were missing major pieces of the puzzle (you know, like being able to configure and provision storage). That’s because in some cases what’s being marketed is the perception of a unified computing solution and in other cases the offering isn’t yet complete or mature. I suppose that explains why Cisco alone has visited the Liquid Computing website from its corporate locations more than 70 times since May!

So, what defines a mature unified computing system? A flexible, dynamic and secure system that brings together standards based (compute, network and storage) capabilities under the software driven command and control of a single architecture. Guess what, I’ve just loosely described the fly-by-wire system of a modern jet fighter, where standard parts are controlled by software that makes decisions far faster and more accurately - without error - than a human being can. In fact, a human being cannot actually fly a jet fighter without the assistance of software control, and it’s the software control that delivers all of the benefits. Without it, the sum of all the other parts is no more or less than an ordinary plane.

So, do you want to continue buying parts and going into battle with Snoopy’s Dog House or are you ready to look at an F-117 Stealth Fighter for about the same price?

Virtualization is Scary for Cisco

There’s been a lot of speculation as to why Cisco decided it had to enter the server market space and why they completely ignored bare metal or “non-virtualized” applications (which according to Yankee Group represent 80% of all enterprise data center applications). To many, the move made no sense because the margins associated with compute gear would severely dilute those of the lucrative switching business. Others believed that they entered the server business as a reaction to a war HP started when it entered the switching business with Pro-Curve. Well, I suppose that could be true if the real world were more like “Survivor”, but it’s not. Companies of Cisco’s caliber seek paths to market dominance at every opportunity. However, when they discover that fate is challenging their domination, they tend to make big moves - reacting with a grand new vision in an attempt to “change the course of a mighty river”.

Such is, I believe, the motivation behind their seemingly half baked, rushed to market before it was ready, unified computing story. Cisco recognizes virtualization as a major market threat and is willing to invest extraordinary time and resource in order to wrestle control away from fate. By their own account, Cisco had 500 engineers assigned to Nexus (UCS) and spent $250MM in cash on it over a 2 year period. That figure doesn’t include the cost of purchasing Nuovo (up to $678MM), whose technology is at the heart of UCS. Note that Ed Bugnion, one of the founders of Nuovo, was a co-founder of VMware, and of course Cisco actually owns a piece of VMware, so they know where that company is headed. Also note that whatever innovation there is in the UCS system, including their proprietary VN-Link technology, is designed to shift control of virtual networking back into Cisco’s physical network infrastructure and management systems. Well isn’t that convenient.

So what’s the concern over virtualization and why is Cisco willing to pay nearly $1B over it? It’s simple. Current and emerging virtualization technologies from VMware, Citrix, Oracle and Microsoft have shined a new light onto a different, more effective and better way to manage data center resources than Cisco has championed for the past 20 years, and the success of virtualization technologies is shifting control of the data center network away from Cisco. In the past, vendors who provided and managed switching and routing within a data center of any size had ultimate control. Now, more and more each quarter, as virtualization technologies evolve, control over WHAT rides across the network, HOW it rides across the network and WHEN it rides across the network is shifting away from the silo’d physically wired world into the domain of the virtual world without walls. Unless Cisco can control virtualization and make it part and parcel of the Cisco Powered Network, their bread and butter revenue is going to go away faster and faster every year - along with the fat margins.

This is the light that Cisco sees at the end of the tunnel, a light that they must transform from a freight train’s headlamp into the light of opportunity.

The 80% that matters

I’ve been spending a lot of time meeting with and speaking to people involved in managing and operating corporate data centers and have come to appreciate the challenges that they’re facing and their frustration with how out-of-sync the big technology vendors are today in addressing their needs. For example, I live in the NYC metro area - home to the financial markets - and the general response that I receive when asking about progress being made to deploy application virtualization is: “Our applications are very large and typically multi-tier in nature, and they simply can’t be virtualized the way more basic applications can”.

In digging further and gathering feedback customers and noted analysts, I’ve consistently found across industries that 80-85% of data center applications aren’t virtualized today at all. What large, complex applications need is infrastructure virtualization.  That is, rather than virtualizing at the software layer, applications that need to run on bare metal are flexibly supported through virtualization of the underlying IT resources. This ensures that these complex applications, which typically span several server tiers, are continuously and dynamically allocated the IT resources required to maintain peak performance (processing power, throughput, storage) from pools of available resources. In a similar manner, excess resources are returned back to the pool when no longer required for the use of other applications. This is, in fact, a big piece of what a complete Unified Computing delivers, and what Liquid Computing has been shipping since the end of ’08. Complete control that extends all the way down to the physical infrastructure.

The Great California Unified Computing BladeSystem Matrix Gala

Holy Cow! Have you ever before seen such thick marketing hype encased around such little substance? In what should otherwise have been an exciting series of product announcements that celebrate the business benefits of a revolutionary way of creating Dynamic Data Centers, Cisco and HP have managed to roll out partial or cobbled together "new" solutions that fall far short of actually doing anything new to deliver unified computing today.

Last week, Cisco held a lengthy webcast sequel to its blockbuster Unified Computing show that was supposed to delve more deeply into the details of their UCS solution. Between it and a tag along PowerPoint deck, they succeeded in comparing their blade's performance to those of other computing blades, provided a very deceptive pricing comparison (because the vendors being compared to kept changing from page to page and seemed to lack associated recurring costs), and never addressed storage! So much for unified computing - you know, compute/network/storage. It sounds more like converged switching and compute. By the way, did you catch in the Q&A section where Cisco was asked how UCS stacked up against Liquid Computing's LiquidIQ solution? In short, Cisco claimed that Liquid's solution was based on Infiniband and that it required bridging to support Ethernet. Well, that would have been true for the company's first product release - in 2007! Cisco really needs to get their facts straight.

HP's product, "BladeSystem Matrix and its Matrix Orchestration Environment", sounds like an old movie favorite of mine recast as an off-off Broadway show. When a vendor resorts to such theatrical conventions, they're probably trying to shift attention to the name rather than the substance. Well, this appears to be the case here as well, since BladeSystem (BS for short) is truly standard commercial piece parts that have been glued together at the management level rather than having been purposefully created to deliver seamless compute/storage and networking from the ground up. Timothy Prickett Morgan of The Register called it "an amalgam of tools that HP has acquired and created from scratch to provision and manage server environments in a more autonomic fashion than has previously been possible". Of course, all HP parts are required. The most amusing part of HP's offering to me is the enormous price (and the bloated professional services required to assemble it all together). Why so funny? Well, because it makes perfect sense for a solution that's comprised of pre-existing piece parts. The Register reports that "a Matrix blade setup would cost in the same ballpark as a rack of servers with the same number of physical servers and storage". Now that's special.

John Brodkin of Network World provided fact based coverage of the recent announcements as well (http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/042009-hp-bladesystem.html). His coverage included mention of the only unified computing company that's shipping a complete solution today - Liquid Computing. Liquid's solution supports both virtualized and bare metal applications while completely addressing compute, networking and storage needs. The best part is that their independent of the big players and make their name with a great product.

Why isn’t anyone talking about security?

We’ve learned a lot over the past 20 years about how so-called innovative approaches, compromised by trade-offs, end up being half-baked solutions that ultimately cause more problems than they cure.  Unified Computing from some vendors could fall fate to this problem.

The concept of uniting compute, storage and networking capabilities as one requires the introduction of a common backbone, or in fancier terms – a fabric – in order to “see” and control activities taking place amongst the components.  This requires an approach that goes beyond the simple connectivity offered by a networking provider that’s simply repurposing existing technology used in “cable once” scenarios.  I for one doubt that a vendor who has focused for 20+ years on routing or switching can hope to appreciate, interpret, or resolve the security implications resulting from the establishment of a broad “networking” fabric.

Fundamentally, there needs to be a sophisticated understanding of the interaction between the application, computing, and network components at a very granular level, and the implications associated with enabling unfettered access between them.  To deliver a full solution – especially in a cloud environment - the fabric must be intelligent enough to introduce new levels of application aware security that common standards don’t deliver.  The big players haven’t even brought up the issue of security as yet, so I suspect that they haven’t figured it out.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons why a certain large UC solution player’s focus is on hypervisor associated applications, where security is another vendor’s issue.  Interestingly though, this same vendor stops short of a full UC solution and instead focuses on connecting components rather than enabling dynamic management and control of storage, compute and networking resources as one across ANY type infrastructure, virtualized or not.  I suggest that you ask them about how the security holes are addressed, because it isn’t a simple issue and only one company that I know of has resolved it, and it isn’t Cisco.

Here Comes Intel!

Intel today formally launched its Xeon 5500 processor – one of the largest launches in its history. You’ll recall that Cisco’s UC vision included to-be-released blade servers built on Intel’s Nehalem (Xeon 5500) processor. Another UC solution provider participated in today’s launch. You can view the full text of their release here: http://www.liquidcomputing.com/news/viewrelease/45. It seems that some of the “special sauce” claims that Cisco made in the introduction of its UC solution last week related to power management, virtualization and processing performance are standard features of the new chip set rather than something unique to Cisco.

Data Centers without Silos

It seems to take 20 or so years for the forces of change and evolution to finally overcome the best efforts of incumbent market leaders and for the dawn of a new age in data center architecture to arrive.

Do you remember what happened to the leaders last time? That's right, giants like IBM, Network General, NCR and DEC were quickly brought to their knees by the power, flexibility and business benefits unleashed by a new approach: routed networks. Little known upstarts with names like Proteon, Wellfleet and of course Cisco quickly grew and innovated faster than the big companies, who were forced to play catch-up while trying to stem business losses associated with customers who were stuck with their old technologies.

Well, here we are again. A few innovative companies are espousing the benefits of a data center without silos (compute, storage and networking), and have real customers deployed. The difference this time is that Cisco - now the giant - has learned from the demise of last generation's leaders, and is marketing itself as the "first innovator". Anyone who's been following this space knows that their approach isn't very inventive, it's certainly anything but open and of course they're not even close to being the first to market. In fact, when you peel back the onion, it's apparent that Cisco has realized how powerful the unified data center concept is - especially as just a way to lock you further into being wholly Cisco powered. Did you watch the multi-hour webcast last week? Did anyone actually see a working product? No, of course not, because it's not available yet. In fact, the more you drill down into their marketing and technology, the more you realize that their vision is more a mirage and their technical specs more of a plan.

If you're interested in learning the straight truth about unified computing, stay tuned. I'm going to go through all of the claims, reveal the truth about what's available today and talk about what really matters. I'm also really interested in hearing about what you're learning too, so that we can all cut though the marketing bull, delineate best practices, and help usher in a new age.

Stay tuned!

Vik