Cisco enters the blade server field IBM or will be shown good

Cisco enters Http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/13737.html "> Blade server Field

It is rumoured that Cisco is preparing to launch its "California" blade line at the earliest of next week, or to wait for better economic conditions to launch the product in April. If Cisco launches its blade server in April, it will coincide with the Blade BAE Insight Forum held in Las Vegas in April from 19 to 21st.

There is not much information about Cisco's "California" blades. However, there has been a lot of speculation about such blades, such as integrating Cisco's Nexus 5000 switch and Nexus 1000V Virtual Switch running on the VMware ESX server virtual machine partition. Other rumors are about the blade itself, such as this x64 server is configured with more memory than a traditional blade server, enabling such servers to perform large-scale server consolidation through virtualization tools, possibly VMware's tools.

Cisco blade servers and wide-viewing networks and virtualization software are part of what Cisco calls the "Genesis Big Bang", a massive product launch. The product launch may not be a "big bang", but it is likely to have an impact over the past 2009 years.

Despite rumours that IBM and HP are dissatisfied with Cisco's access to the server market, Cisco has no choice but to develop and move beyond the new market. IBM has a smaller, high-end x64 server business and takes Cisco as its network partner for its BladeCenter Blade chassis. IBM is likely to compete directly with Cisco in the Data center area. Of course, unless Cisco does something IBM likes, such as supporting IBM's BladeCenter Blade chassis and working with IBM to promote these products. There is no indication that such a thing will happen. There is not even such a rumor of potential cooperation.

IBM or will be good

In fact, IBM has to do well with Cisco in ways that HP may not accept, because HP has a procurve switch business. Dell, Sun, and a handful of blade-server vendors will do the same. IBM knows how to do it.

Alex Yost, vice president of IBM's BladeCenter products, explains that Cisco is a leading player in network equipment and will continue to be a valuable partner for blade servers. Our job is to provide an open platform. Providing Cisco switches is what we're going to do. I don't think that's going to change. Our customers need Cisco's Ethernet network technology. When our customers need other products, we will provide other products.

Yost that Cisco might regret the launch of its "California" blade server. ' I've been in the x86 server business for many years, ' he said. I think it's hard for Cisco to keep that kind of profit margin in the Internet sector.

In addition to the main production of x86 and x64 servers, IBM is also trying to stay in the most profitable mid-range and high-end vertical server market, selling rack servers and tower servers to large enterprises. Large enterprises buy a large amount of equipment at once or through a reseller channel. Partners are responsible for the cost of doing business in the reseller channel. HP and Dell (as well as Fujitsu in Europe and Japan) produce millions of servers a day, sell them to SMEs through direct sales or sales channels, and reduce the cost of components in a more quantitative way.

The advantage of Cisco's "California" blades is that Cisco is already a network device distributor and has a huge access to data centers and users. These users already know and trust Cisco's products. If someone can propose an integrated server-storage-switch hybrid solution, fully integrated and capable of running virtualized applications, that's Cisco.

IBM would do the same thing if IBM had a network business. When Cisco launched the "California" blade, HP could do the same, Because HP already has the ability to virtualize the switch software and has its own virtual machine management program (for the itanium® server) or with other vendors to provide virtual User management program (Jie XenServer is an obvious choice).

This is indeed the double whammy IBM currently does not need in the blade area. From 2003 to 2005, IBM's share of the blade market was between 40% and 50% per quarter. Hewlett-Packard began to be strong after the acquisition of Compaq in 2001, with HP's market share subsequently falling after the strong growth of IBM's Bladecenters Blade server. However, after the launch of the C-class Bladesystems Blade Server in 2006, Hewlett-Packard regain the dominance of the blade server market. Hewlett-Packard sold its 1 millionth blade server in August 2008. HP's c3000 blades for small businesses have sold for many months ahead of IBM's BladeCenter s blades.

IBM's Yost says that with C-class bladesystems Blades, Hewlett-Packard has to work with partners to implement the strategy of cutting everything. ' I'm highly rated for some of the features they offer, such as hot-swappable hard drives, ' says Yost. They used these new features to block IBM's sales. However, our BladeCenter blades have proved resilient. We are sure IBM will lead in performance in 2009.

Yost said that IBM and HP are currently in the blade market market share status between 2003 and 2005 in the x86 and x64 server market similar. But in 2009, IBM apparently had to recapture some market share. New switch and connection adapters provided by partners and new "Nehalem" blades will be key to achieving this goal.

IBM also expects its BladeCenter s blade server to grow steadily in small and medium sized enterprises. More than 4,000 retailers with BladeCenter s Blades run 48,600 operating systems and their local businesses. The small blades will be located in an integrated platform of the enterprise using the as/400 and iseries servers. These businesses with mixed as/400 and Windows workloads are desperately in need of modernizing their servers and storage.

Educational institutions are also deploying bladecenter s blades as back-end devices for Virtual PC settings to reduce PC hardware and technical support costs.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)