Cisco

EMC/VMW Acquisition By Cisco Imminent?

February 12, 2009 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

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.

Cisco Plans Bold Move Into Server Business, Enters Arena With HP And IBM

January 20, 2009 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

According to the NY Times, Cisco Systems is planning a big push into the server market, essentially entering into competition with its historical partners HP and IBM (who declined to comment on the story).

A risky move for Cisco, but a very interesting one.

The product — a server computer equipped with sophisticated virtualization software — is a bold but risky move by Cisco into an unfamiliar, intensely competitive market that typically produces far lower profits than Cisco makes from network gear. But it reflects the company’s ambition to grow beyond its roots as the so-called plumber of the Internet to offer everything from instant messaging software to digital stereos.

As The Register points out, VMware technology is likely the foundation of the virtualization part, since Cisco still owns part of the company (about 2%). Cisco is not disclosing any specifics though, but the NY Times learned that Cisco could show off the first of its new systems as early as March.

Acquisition rumors between Cisco Systems and VMware (and even EMC in full) are sure to flare up again.

A good follow-up article was published on Forbes.

Cisco Partners With VMware For Its MDS SANs

November 10, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

As part of its Data Center 3.0 strategy, Cisco is collaborating with VMware to deliver a tested and validated solution for Cisco MDS storage area networks (SANs) designed specifically to help customers improve the security, scalability and management of storage networks attached to VMware environments. The Cisco vision for Data Center 3.0 entails the real-time, dynamic orchestration of infrastructure services from shared pools of virtualized server, storage and network resources, while optimizing application performance, service levels, efficiency and collaboration.

The combined solution of Cisco MDS SANs with VMware’s Virtual Datacenter OS (VDC-OS) helps customers to more easily implement storage consolidation, disaster recovery, business continuity and storage backup solutions, as well as improve the visibility, security, and traffic isolation of applications.

VMware provides this functionality as part of the VDC-OS, which increases ROI while enabling the flexibility customers need to build next-generation data centers that are highly elastic, self-managing and self-healing. Cisco MDS SANs can now be virtual machine-optimized, delivering a resilient, high-performance fabric to support large, dense virtual environments by providing consistent policy, visibility, and diagnostics for virtual machines across the data center.

Cisco SANs optimized by VMware provide security, mobility, performance monitoring and capacity planning at the virtual machine level, enabling IT managers to better monitor, manage, and scale SAN-attached virtual machines. For example, IT managers can now move, add or change servers without reconfiguring SAN switches or storage arrays, and servers can retain their SAN identity even when moved or replaced in the server chassis.

Cisco and VMware also jointly offer virtualization consulting services to help customers create and deploy server, network and storage virtualization solutions that can reduce cost by provisioning new applications quickly and more safely, while maintaining high levels of application performance.

Intel Cuts VMware Stake In Half

November 4, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

While Cisco is increasing its stake in VMware, Intel is reducing it. The company plans to sell the bulk of those shares on Tuesday, according to a regulatory filing.

Intel disclosed that it had recently sold 1 million shares in the virtualization software maker and plans to sell another 3.75 million VMware shares on the open market “approximately” on Tuesday.

The chipmaker originally paid $23 per share for the stock in a private placement. VMware shares hit a record high of $125.25 on October 31, 2007, after going public in August that year at $29 per share.

Shares of VMware, which is majority-owned by EMC, fell nearly 4 percent before recovering to trade up 0.53 percent at $31.98 in morning trade on the New York Stock Exchange.

Cisco Ups Stake In VMware

November 2, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Cisco announced yesterday that it will acquire an increased equity stake in VMware.

Cisco will purchase 500,000 shares of VMware Class A common stock currently held by Intel for approximately $13.3M. Upon closing of the investment, Cisco will own approximately 1.7% percent of VMware’s total outstanding common stock.

Cisco’s purchase is intended to build on the strong inter-company collaboration between Cisco and VMware in the adoption of the companies’ virtualization products and solutions that address the intersection of virtualization and networking technologies.

In September, 2008, Cisco and VMware announced several joint initiatives in the data center virtualization market including the launch of the The Cisco Nexus® 1000V distributed virtual software switch, enhanced professional services and reseller certification training

Cisco Teams Up With QLogic to Offer End-to-End Virtualization Technology

October 13, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

QLogic today announced it has set up a partnership with Cisco to offer end-to-end virtualization technology, using Qlogic adapters that allow end-users to realize the benefits of quality of service capabilities in standards-based virtual fabric environments. Virtual fabrics provide storage administrators with an industry-standard method for improving storage area network or SAN security, scalability and performance by segmenting physical SANs into multiple virtual SANs.

Qlogic said its quality of service capability enables IT administrators to tie virtual machines to virtualized fabric environments such as Cisco VSANs using NPIV technology, which has been enabled in QLogic adapters since 2006.

Cisco Systems