Industry Moves and Countermoves

Of course, those major server OEMs may not see it the same way. Their countermeasures may include, for example, a little tit for tat: they may consider replacing networking components heretofore provided by Cisco with hardware from Juniper Networks Inc. or Brocade.

Another hurdle Cisco faces in adoption of UCS is that it has no history of building servers. "No one is clamoring for another server vendor, so despite the strong showing of partners at this launch, Cisco will have to win over enterprise server buyers who, up to this point, have had no relationship with the company," wrote Staten and Schreck in their blog.

The only conceptually direct competition to UCS comes from Marlboro, Mass.-based Egenera Inc. Egenera's Processor Area Network (PAN) Manager essentially abstracts server and network resources in the same way a Storage Area Network abstracts storage resources.

Like Cisco's new system, PAN Manager pools physical and virtual resources into a blade platform. The company now works with OEMs to integrate PAN Manager onto additional hardware platforms. The company boasts a strong OEM relationship with Dell, which places PAN Manager on the PowerEdge M610 blade servers.

Egenera chief marketing officer Christine Crandell says the unified architecture is the solution to the "complexity conundrum" that surrounds the presence of many silos in a data center and the difficulty involved in managing them. "The savings for the high-end data center in CAPEX/OPEX is up to 70 percent," she says.

The drivers that Egenera identifies for its installed base of about 1,300 customers include single-vendor support, the simplicity of a "wire once" approach and the fluidity provided by software-based virtualization.

HP's most similar offering is HP Matrix, a converged software, server, storage and networking platform that automates service delivery for the data center. HP Matrix Orchestration Environment provides a unified management interface to design, deploy and optimize the application infrastructure. Together, these offerings create an integrated pool of resources that operate in both physical and virtual environments, creating a pre-packaged infrastructure.

HP is highlighting the virtualization aspects of HP Matrix, with the bundling of HP Insight Capacity Advisor Virtualization Service into the infrastructure. The service, according to HP, helps customers assess, plan and design their virtual environment. HP Insight Capacity Advisor consolidation software identifies the best approach for reducing the risk of downtime, increasing responsiveness and helping maximize the return on investment of a virtualized deployment, according to the company.