Cisco Barges Into the Server Market 206
mikesd81 was one of several readers to write in about Cisco's announcement of what has been called Project California — a system comprising servers made from 64-bit Intel Nehalem EP Xeon processors, storage, and networking in a single rack, glued together with software from VMWare and BMC. Coverage of this announcement is everywhere. Business Week said: "The new device, dubbed Project California, takes servers into new territory by cramming computer power into the very box that contains storage capacity and the networking tools that are Cisco's specialty. Cisco's approach could help companies use fewer machines — saving money not only on hardware, but also on power and IT staffing — in building data centers. ... Cisco is well-girded to take this step. It has more than $30 billion in cash, more than any other tech company. The company is moving into no fewer than 28 different markets, including digital music in the home and public surveillance systems." The Register provides more analysis: "Microsoft is, of course, a partner on the California system, since you can't ignore Windows in the data center, and presumably, Hyper-V will be supported alongside ESX Server on the hypervisors. (No one at the Cisco launch answered that and many other questions seeking details). ... The one thing that Cisco is clear on is who is signing off on these deals: the CIO. Cisco and its partners are going right to the top to push the California systems, right over the heads of server, storage, and network managers who want to protect their own fiefdoms."
Huh!?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Cisco...saving money?!?! Right.
Sounds expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like the right architecture, but at a price.
It amazes me that so many "enterprise" IT companies can sell what are essentially just Linux servers [networkworld.com] with their brand name tacked-on, at a 5000% mark-up.
yeah, but will it be 32bit only? (Score:4, Insightful)
it's 2009, years after we were supposed to have flying cars, most new computers are 64bit, and Cisco refuses to release a 64bit IPSec client For x64 (64-bit) Windows support, you must utilize Cisco's next-generation Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client." [cisco.com]. So umm...we're supposed to think they have any clue what's going on above layer 4 these days? What are they going to be installing on these servers, Windows2000?
Re:Why use bleeding edge intel chips? (Score:5, Insightful)
haven't read the details, but intel probably put more virtualization logic into the CPU like they have been doing for the last few years. the price isn't that big a deal if you can put more VM's per CPU core than on the older chips
Re:Why use bleeding edge intel chips? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to ask : why Nehalem EP Xeons? (...) the most expensive by a significant margin. The motherboards are more expensive as well,
Expensive - Cisco, so what's the part you don't understand?
Re:Why use bleeding edge intel chips? (Score:3, Insightful)
I have to ask : why Nehalem EP Xeons?
Because they are there to make a splash with ridiculous specs. Specs that wouldn't be possible without Nehalem. They're innocent looking enough (we have a few), but they are here to make an impact.
Blah Blah Blah (Score:3, Insightful)
They go for the "soft" target (Score:5, Insightful)
The one thing that Cisco is clear on is who is signing off on these deals: the CIO. Cisco and its partners are going right to the top to push the California systems, right over the heads of server, storage, and network managers who want to protect their own fiefdoms.
Presumably, they are doing this because they know that the CIOs, on average, are less well informed than their technical subordinates. It is a classic salesman's tactic: go straight to the "decision maker." I'm not saying that CIOs are not well qualified and intelligent people (I'm sure that most are). However, at the CxO level in a large company, you are a strategic thinker. You are most likely not going to be on the bleeding edge of the latest hardware trend.
To put it another way, the CIO is the "soft" target. You always go for the soft target.
Naturally, Cisco (and other vendors) know this. Hence, you go after the CIO and dazzle him with fancy presentations and wine and dine him and viola, you get a big sale. This how MS does it, and how other big tech companies do it.
If you are fortunate enough to have the ear of your CIO, make sure to warn him about snake oil peddlers.
Building a more powerful great firewall? (Score:1, Insightful)
These systems seem like the kind of all-in-one boxes that would enable an authoritarian government, say China, to log and filter the internet more easily. Of course Cisco would never sell equipment for such purposes...
Re:Microsoft, of course ? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are many different reasons you might want a server, web presence is only one.
Re:Blah Blah Blah (Score:5, Insightful)
They suck at everything else.
Not everything they do is perfect, but they broke into the Fibre Channel switching business quite effectively. They can, and do, break into new markets. Servers are a logical step for them since there's a huge advantage to providing a vertical stack of networking, servers, and whatever else they can muster.
Now more than just hardware.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I used to think along the same lines as you, that with 'reasonably competent' administration, it's all a wash.
And now after a stint in the industry, I've realized a lot of the industry is unable or unwilling to invest what is required to make effective use of hardware. The stuff in general can be complex and many companies are content to pay a premium to the vendor to tap into their aggregated skills rather than probably pay even more to have architects of their own with the experience and skills to match the vendor.
In this case, they are dressing up some core technologies that are pretty well understood, wrapping up it all with a lot of buzzwords, and pushing forward. The technical cynic in me shrugs, but I recognize what they *claim* to be trying to do may be valuable to some people.
That said, after years of struggling with Cisco's repeated decisions to support their proprietary standards to the exclusion of industry standards make me not want to touch their equipment or embrace any 'full management' stack they would want to give me. Some of it does the job sufficiently, but buying into a platform that makes it difficult to entertain competing product is something I like to avoid.
Re:They go for the "soft" target (Score:3, Insightful)
Despite what your ID number says; you are new around here, aren't you?
Re:WOW. Innovation at every step! (Score:1, Insightful)
Whoosh!
Re:Why use bleeding edge intel chips? (Score:4, Insightful)
There are limits. Running more VM's on a CPU costs power, and makes that physical device a single point of failure for multiple environments. Balancing such environments turns out to be much, much trickier than a lot of people like to admit: the very clever and sophisticated software to swap around live environments or do load balancing becomes its _own_ point of failure, bringing down entire racks of equipment in intermittent or even complete failures.
And yes, I've had this happen with servers with "five nines" uptime lauded and promised but somehow, never actually written into the contract. It would have been a lot cheaper to simply do a regular backup schedule and have a second rack of more capable, cheaper, failover equipment.
Re:A good move (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly. The grandparent's argument falls on its face as soon as you hook up your do-everything-box to a telco circuit.
Re:Why use bleeding edge intel chips? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have not put it through the ringer with other tests...
It's wringer. You put things through a wringer [wikipedia.org] to squeeze the water out of them. This is very stressful. If the item in question isn't clothing, and isn't strong, it's likely to break. If it's a person, it's likely to punch the shit out of you when you're done.
Re:If you can't make the sale, move up the org cha (Score:2, Insightful)
Now I fully realize that software routing just isn't as good as Cisco's hardware routing
Depends which box you're talking about but sometimes "hardware routing" is just software routing on an embedded processor. Something to keep in mind.
Brought to you by the authors of IOS (Score:4, Insightful)
Any interface or management tools for such virtualized pool systems, brought to you by the company that wrote and maintains IOSS, already has a serious hurdle to jump. That language is very, very clever and flexible. It is also absolutely awful for attempting to do simple, straightforward configuration tasks that _look_ like they should work from the documentation, but which extra steps to actually provide and can only be done directly from the text interface, not from _any_ of the GUI's. (I spent some time trying to configure proper failover behavior last year on a set of switches. It was painful.)
If their virtualization management tools are similarly powerful, flexible, and utterly useless to anyone not a highly trained Cisco technician, then these systems will be very expensive and under-utilized doorstops in most environments. If, however, they've fired the fools who wrote the IOS control language and replaced them with people being fired by Juniper and thus raised the IQ at both companies, then they have a chance to fill a serious niche in environments like Wal-Mart, where a centrally managed and flexible system could manage inventory, sales registers, their highly automated security and power management, and personnel records. Putting all those on different servers provided by different vendors is nightmarish to manage: having a consistent, virtualized hardware environment makes hardware repairs and upgrades far, far more efficient, in my experience.
And let's face it: when I've looked at the stock room at such a facility, I've often seen a server or desktop stashed under someone's desk, lying on top of a card table in a corner where it never got mounted but is still in use, or miscabled and unscrewed down with only one plug in on top of a rack with an overloaded UPS. Simplifying and modularizing that for such an environment would be a big headache that I wouldn't have to have for dealing with such partners and clients. (I highly recommend taking a cell phone and taking pictures of such setups to let their head office know there is a problem.)
Re:Blah Blah Blah (Score:3, Insightful)
We're just seeing what the graphics folks would call "one more time around the wheel of karma": a prototype of something new is done in software, implemented in proprietary hardware for speed, and soon afterwards the next generation of main CPUs catches up to the point where it can be done in software once more, usually with some small amount of custom silicon on the interface board.
--dave
Re:Why use bleeding edge intel chips? (Score:3, Insightful)
In the first corner we have...
VMWare ESX + HA, dual power supplies, fibre channel (read: real) SAN, shared SCSI(FCP) storage, centralized management console
and the new challenger...
Xen, single power supply, SATA, swappable USB storage for failover, command line
Those are from two totally different divisions... planets... galaxies, what have you. You cannot compare the two.
You don't actually talk someone out of a SAN and into buying USB storage, or from ESX+HA to physically swapping external storage. It doesn't work like that.
That's like talking someone out of buying a McLaren and into a Civic.
I can't fathom recommending manually swapping external storage as failover to someone actually paying me money, so just where do you draw the line for that solution? How big an IT budget, number of employees, etc? I'm perpetually stunned by people on Slashdot who think that bottom rung technology is good enough for absolutely everyone, or anyone who doesn't use it is wasting money. I hope you can see that Xen solution, as you described it, doesn't fly very far in real world datacenters (where most server virtualization is going on)