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?