3/30/2012 -- Cisco Systems Inc. last month trumpeted the latest revision of its Unified Compute System (UCS) as "the third-generation of fabric computing."

Cisco's announcement marked the three-year anniversary of UCS.

According to industry watchers, Cisco and UCS have accomplished a lot over the last 36 months -- starting with a promotion, of sorts. Gartner Inc. recently moved Cisco from the "Visionary" to the "Leaders" field in its "Magic Quadrant for Blade Servers." Cisco also flagged strong revenue growth -- it logged $1.3 billion in UCS-related revenues in 2011 -- and its 11,000th UCS customer.

All evidence, Cisco proclaimed, of UCS' uptake, momentum and impact.

In a very specific sense, Cisco does have a good bit to crow about, agrees industry veteran Dan Kusnetzky, a principal with consultancy Kusnetzky Group. "Cisco does appear to be growing strongly and has moved its position in the worldwide server market from zero to over $1 billion in revenues in about three years -- healthy growth by any measure," he writes.

As Kusnetzky and other observers note, however, the recent UCS 3.0 launch -- with its emphasis on fabric computing -- likewise highlights the challenges that beset Cisco.

Because although Cisco has been talking fabric since 2009, it's by no means the only player talking fabric: It faces fierce competition from competitors in the data center infrastructure space it's targeting with UCS. That's one reason Kusnetzky is skeptical of some of Cisco's claims to innovation. As part of its UCS 3.0 festivities, for example, Cisco cited both technology integration -- in the form of unified compute, networking, and virtualization, storage assets -- and investment protection (in the form of an easy upgrade path to new UCS resources) as differentiators relative to its competitors. Trouble is, Kusnetzky argues, competitors such as Dell Inc., Egenera Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP), IBM Corp., NEC and Fujitsu can make similar claims.

And rivals IBM and HP can go Cisco one better on the management tip.

"IBM and HP both offer extensive portfolios of management software, allowing their systems to appear as pools of dynamically assignable resources," he points out. "Each of these suppliers offer systems that treat system resources as a pool that can be assigned to tasks as needed and offer sophisticated management tools to make the process simple," he continues.

Fabric's the Thing
In the data center networking space, Cisco's made fabric a centerpiece of its recent product development. Here, too, it faces plenty of competition. Rivals such as Arista Networks, Egenera, HP, IBM and Juniper Networks all claim to deliver innovative fabric technologies.

In the high-end, in particular, Cisco has had plenty of fight from arch-rival Juniper, which announced its next-gen data center fabric technology, QFabric, in February of last year. QFabric didn't actually become available until Q3 of last year, and Juniper was able to tout a signal customer win -- Bell Canada -- by late October. At about the same time, Cisco announced the availability of a new Fabric-2 module for its Nexus 7000 switching line. Fabric-2 offers roughly double the per-port performance of its predecessor (the aptly-named Fabric-1) and uses a technology called parallel forwarding to boost the overall capacity of Nexus 7000 to 15 Tbps.

QFabric looks like a beast -- on paper, at least. Although Juniper claims a scalability of over 60Tbps for Qfabric, benchmark results that it released just last month show a maximum of about one-quarter of this, or 15.3 Tbps for a total of 1,536 10GigE ports. That's basically identical to the maximum capacity that Cisco claims to deliver with Nexus 7000 and Fabric-2.

The recent UCS 3.0 launch also highlighted the extent to which Cisco is leveraging its fabric technology to scale its UCS server assets. Cisco announced its new UCS 6296UP Fabric Interconnect, which offers double the capacity of its existing fabric (1.92 Tbps as against 960 Gbps) and which Cisco says can be used to scale UCS deployments by connecting Nexus Fabric Extenders (FEX). Shops can tap FEX to connect up to 20 UCS chassis in a single system.

The Price Is Right
Dale Roberts, a manager of platform support services with a prominent university based in Washington, D.C., says he wasn't attracted to the potential management synergies of a combined UCS data center and Cisco networking stack. (Roberts' employer is a big Cisco networking shop.) Nor, Roberts adds, was he overly concerned about the switching capacity or performance of Cisco's data center fabric. As Roberts and his employer saw it, the price had to be right.

At first, this wasn't the case. "Entry costs to UCS are [prohibitive]," he comments, noting that this is chiefly a function of the cost of UCS chassis itself. "That's why we ignored [Cisco] before. Then they gave us the chassis for free, which reduces the cost dramatically," he continues, adding that the UCS "blades themselves are pretty reasonably priced." Roberts' shop transitioned off of a SPARC-based infrastructure of standalone or rack-mounted systems to a UCS cluster running VMWare and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). And while cost was the primary driver, Roberts says he's come to appreciate the built-in upgradeability of the UCS paradigm.

"[W]e will never have to buy fiber [i.e., fabric] again, [because] we connect it once and [we're] done," he concludes. "[Basically,] they gave us a sweet deal, and [UCS has] got a lot less cabling than a cluster of standalone servers and ... other blade servers."
--By Stephen Swoyer