3/17/2009 -- As expected, Cisco Systems Inc. this week unveiled its most ambitious take to date on the next-gen datacenter: its Unified Computing System (UCS), a datacenter architecture that emphasizes integration between and among blade servers, storage and network resources.

Unified Computing is both a broad and an ambitious vision, encompassing as it does two disciplines (namely server and storage virtualization) in which Cisco can't credibly claim best-of-breed expertise. It also places Cisco into direct competition against several vendors -- chief among them Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM Corp. -- with which it has successfully partnered in the past.

To recap, UCS comprises several different offerings, starting with Cisco's UCS Manager, an administrative environment that supports physical device management. Other UCS components include fabric interconnect and fabric extenders for both 10 GigE and FCoE interfaces, and support for both virtual host bus adapter (HBA) and network interface controller (NIC) adapters.

Perhaps most startling of all, Cisco will market blade servers and proprietary blade enclosures, a move that not only takes it far afield from its networking-centric pedigree but also places it into potentially withering competition against Dell, HP, IBM and other specialty blade providers.

In addition, experts say, Unified Computing prescribes a healthy dose of Cisco's quasi-proprietary special sauce (chiefly its Data Center Ethernet, or DCE, technology), putting it at odds with other industry players which are working with another technology, based on the IEEE's Data Center Bridging standards, called Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE).

There's also some question about the maturity of Cisco's offering, which must contend with established entries from both HP and IBM. In this respect, especially, Cisco faces an uphill battle, according to industry watcher Gartner Inc.

"With UCS, Cisco pits itself against HP...IBM and Dell. UCS Manager is up against mature and established Systems Insight Manager and IBM Director, while the UCS fabric and blades are positioned against [HP's] C-Class and H-Class blades," wrote analysts Philip Dawson, George Weiss and Andrew Butler in a Gartner research blast. "Cisco is betting that UCS's technological differences will beat the competition, but Gartner believes that to displace an incumbent vendor like HP, these features must also be price-competitive and offer value, as the server market is driven by price, and at margin pressure that is lower than Cisco's norm."

Elsewhere, Cisco must wrangle with storage powerhouses EMC Corp. and NetApp, the Gartner trio noted: "UCS's architected system storage fabric has limited Fibre Channel bandwidth on the top of the rack switching fabric. This restricts Cisco as it competes and makes it dependent on storage partners such as EMC and NetApp for the storage component."

More to the point, Cisco's all-encompassing UCS vision is at this stage incomplete, which more or less requires the use of complementary third-party offerings. "Cisco offers basic server management and tools for virtualization and energy management. However, continued dependence on third parties for provisioning and integration of the application infrastructure will require that customers remain intimate with software vendors such as Citrix, IBM, Oracle, VMware, Microsoft and SAP," the trio wrote. "[T]his will inhibit Cisco from readily gaining more datacenter account control. UCS will need further integration and go-to-market efforts with solution vendors and independent software vendors (ISVs). Solutions and related marketing of UCS will be indicators of Cisco's success in the volume server market."

Cisco officials, on the other hand, are spinning UCS as both an ambitious and a necessary move on the company's part. "The virtual machine has become the new atomic building block of the datacenter, creating new challenges and opportunities with the potential to transform the computing environment and deliver significant benefits," said Mario Mazzola, senior vice president of Cisco's Server Access and Virtualization Business Unit, in a statement. "Taking advantage of this architectural shift in the datacenter, we developed a unique new computing model that transforms the datacenter into a dynamic IT environment with the power to increase productivity, improve business agility and drive the benefits of virtualization to an entirely new level." --Stephen Swoyer