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!