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Cisco Solution Brings Unified Voice, Video To Virtual Environments

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Cisco today unveiled the next phase of its Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI) with a series of offerings.

Utilizing its expertise in Unified Communications, Cisco announced endpoints that enable high-quality voice and video in virtual desktop environments – a development that it says could help redefine collaboration in the virtual workspace.

The announcement comes at a time when desktop virtualization is on the rise in the enterprise. The worldwide hosted virtual desktop (HVD) market is expected to reach 70 million units, or 15 percent of enterprise desktops and laptops by 2014.

Cisco is addressing this head-on with VXI, an open, validated virtual workspace solution that integrates products and technologies across Cisco’s network-based architectures – from Collaboration to Borderless Networks to the Data Center as well as from partners — to help deliver a flexible, highly secure infrastructure.

More information is available here.

Cisco Touts 4,000 Customers For Its Unified Computing System, And Other Milestones

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Cisco this morning announced a series of customer and technology milestones across the Unified Fabric, Unified Computing System and Unified Network Services technology portfolios which form the foundation of its Data Center Business Advantage architectural framework.

Cisco announced that it has shipped its one millionth Nexus 10Gb Ethernet port, bringing the total number of Nexus ports in customer production environments to more than 7,000,000.

The company also surpassed 10,000 NX-OS customers and neared 4,000 Unified Computing Systems customers at the end of its fiscal second quarter.

The Nexus and UCS families of products are vital assets in Cisco’s cloud computing portfolio. They provide the building blocks for virtualized data center and private cloud environments, and are already deployed by enterprises for private cloud applications such as desktop virtualization, hosted voice, video, collaboration and security.

UCS and Nexus have been implemented for cloud services at service providers such as AlphaWest, Cincinnati Bell, Navisite, Orange Business Services, PINS, Rackspace, Radiant, Savvis and Terremark.

Cisco announced today that it has reached nearly 4,000 customers for its Unified Computing System, eighteen months since the first generation of the platform shipped. In excess of 1,000 of these customers are said to be repeat purchasers of UCS.

As of Cisco’s fiscal year second quarter 2011, Cisco’s Unified Computing System revenue grew more than 700% year-over-year, bringing the UCS annualized revenue run rate to $650M.

Andreessen, Horowitz Back Cloud Computing Startup WebappVM

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A new cloud computing startup funded and advised by legendary entrepreneurs turned investors Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz plans to help enterprise companies deploy and manage applications in the cloud. Other webappVM team members have experience at Cisco Systems, Tellme, and Juniper Networks, according to the company’s web site.

WebappVM is the name of the Redwood City company, and they’re building a “self-monitoring application cloud” for web applications that will provide enterprise-style app management capabilities to public and private clouds.

The company is backed by Shasta Ventures and Sierra Ventures as well as Andreessen and Horowitz, who recently raised $300 million to fund early-stage investments.

webappVM was previously known as OSS-1701, and was founded in May 2008 by CEO Issac Roth and CTO Tobias Kunze Briseño. Roth most recently worked as director of product management at the Wily Computing business of Computer Associates, while Briseno was a senior development manager at Lycos Europe.

Roth recently demonstrated webappVM’s technology at Sun’s CommunityOne event, describing it as “a special kind of virtual machine” that allows developers to build an app on a local machine, upload it to the cloud (in this case Sun’s OpenCloud) and immediately begin running the application with built-in management tools.

(Via Data Center Knowledge)

IBM Walks Away From Talks Over Potential Sun Acquisition

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IBM has withdrawn its $7 billion bid for Sun Microsystems today (Sunday), reports the NY Times, who confirmed the collapse of the talks based on a statement from an unnamed source while several other media, including the Wall Street Journal and ZDNet, were still speculating. The New York Times correctly points out this leaves Sun free to pursue other opportunities for selling itself.

Since last year, Sun executives had been meeting with potential buyers. I.B.M. stepped up, seeing an opportunity to add to its large software business, acquire valuable researchers and consolidate the market for larger, so-called server computers that corporations use in their data centers.

In their talks, I.B.M. and Sun had a contract to deal with each other exclusively. Now, Sun is free to pursue other suitors, including I.B.M. rivals like Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems. Cisco recently entered the market for server computers.

It will be interesting to watch the market react to this on Monday morning.

Exclusive – Cisco’s Unified Computing Platform: The Details

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Today Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) will unveil its long-awaited server line, one of the building blocks that was still missing from their Unified Computing vision. This announcement is bound to shake up the IT industry in general, and the x86 server market in particular. Even though this market has several well established players like IBM, Dell, HP and to a lesser extent Sun, Cisco is determined to extend its already impressive datacenter footprint to this market as well.

What Cisco CEO John Chambers called “Datacenter 3.0” during his keynote at VMworld back in september 2007 has now been rebranded as “Unified Computing”. Different name, same concept.

Cisco emphasises that this is a big new concept, where the most important part is the (unified) network and the integrated management. We suppose the traditional server manufacturers beg to differ.

Without further ado, we’ve got the scoop on the juicy details:

  • Cisco California blade servers come in a new chassis (unlike for example Intel, whose now defunct Enterprise Blade Server line consisted of rebranded IBM kit).
  • The chassis has 8 slots, that can fit 8 half-width or 4 full-width blades. At the bottom of the chassis there are 4 power modules, on both sides there are two “FEX”es, or Fabric Extenders.
  • Each of the 8 slots has got a 10 Gb connection to one of the two Fabric Extenders.
  • The blades come in two models, both with two sockets, populated with Intel Xeon CPU’s based on the Core i7 (“Nehalem“) microarchitecture. The half-width blades have got 12 memory slots, the full-width have a whopping 48 memory banks. By leveraging the next generation Intel architecture, this allows for an unmatched memory density, which has traditionally been the bottleneck in virtualized environments. (Providing 384 Gb requires crazy expensive 8 Gb dimms. Using cheaper 4 Gb dimms still allows for an impressive 192 Gb of memory per blade.)
  • There are no dedicated management or switching modules in the chassis. The FEXes connect to the UCS 6100 (UCS = Unified Computing Switch), which is based on the Nexus 5020 switch. The UCS6100 is a “top of rack” switch that will carry the TCP/IP data, block level data (through FCoE) and the management of the system. By externalizing this management and switching, Cisco makes it easier to upgrade their chassis to new technologies later on, and it keeps as much of the environment as possible close to the network core, their traditional turf, treating the server as a commodity. The UCS communicates with a management chip on each blade to manage and monitor the server components. This management solution was co-developed with BMC.

Cisco will undoubtedly emphasise how this is a solution, based on a network architecture. As Christopher Hoff puts it at his Rational Security blog: It walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, but it’s a solution.

Now, how will the market react to this announcement is unknown. HP, IBM and the likes pretend to be unimpressed by their new competitor, but it’s worth noting Cisco might be on to something:

  • The more customers use virtualization, the more they need central management whereas the underlying servers become interchangeable building blocks. By integrating the management in the network switching, Cisco can reinforce their stronghold in the heart of the datacenter.
  • Cisco is a new player. They arent’ experienced in the server market, but they also could start designing their solution from the ground up, learning from mistakes made by their competitors. Expect them to try to silence potential criticts with a global service organisation (in partnership with Accenture and local partners), reference customers (Savvis is named to be a beta customer) and certifications by the likes of VMware, Oracle and SAP.
  • Fiber Channel and Ethernet are on a path to convergence. Storage vendors are preparing or shipping FCoE-capable arrays. (It’s likely EMC and/or NetApp will show up at the announcement later today.) Brocade, Cisco’s biggest competitor in the SAN market, knows this as well, but their aqcuisition of Foundry Networks was delayed by some shareholders. Their product lines will likely stay separate for several quarters to come, whilst Cisco is shipping a unified product line today.
  • Cisco is alienating their current partners like IBM and HP. This was inevitable however, as HP was already moving into Cisco’s market with their ProCurve switches, IBM has always courted multiple brides, and is now intensifying its relationship with Juniper. In a down economy, it’s everyone to himself. It is also the opportunity for challengers to enter new markets. Cisco has got a $30 billion piggy bank, a result of their average 65% margins. They can afford a fight, and we’re likely to see one, no matter how hard IBM, HP and even Cisco want to downplay the significance of this announcement.

It’s obvious VMware is involved in this play as well. They’ve been talking about the “software mainframe” for quite a while now, Chambers introduced “Datacenter 3.0” at VMworld in 2007, and Cisco is a minority shareholder in VMware.

Update: VMware has already put out its press release and a YouTube video in which CEO Paul Maritz talks about Unified computing.
Update: The Cisco press release is out as well.
Pictures are over at Flickr, and in the data sheet.

Cisco has published a full list of partners:

Stay tuned for the Cisco announcement later today. The webcast starts at 10:30 AM Pacific Time, 18:30 CET. You can tune in at Cisco.com.

EMC/VMW Acquisition By Cisco Imminent?

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Great field work on Virtualization.info today about the fact that investors are buying heaps of VMware stock, signalling that something is up.

A small excerpt:

Monday’s SEC filings shows that Cisco posted a prospectus on raising $4 billion in senior bonds. The book building is run by all the major investment banks and is closing on February 17.
Cisco must be really confident for such a major issuance in these market conditions, but Standard & Poors is giving the senior unsecured notes an A+ rating with a stable outlook.
Cisco will use $500 million of the $4 billion to repay short term debt.  When combined with sizeable cash holdings, this leaves them with with $4.7 billion in cash at the US parent company. According to CNET that amount excluded cash holdings at subsidiaries overseas.