BANGALORE, INDIA: Cisco's attempt to pace up with the likes of Sun, HP, IBM, Microsoft or VMware in the data center business with its Unified Computing System (UCS), which marries and unites network, computing, virtualization and device management to deliver seamless infrastructure for data center, is an interesting one at the outset.

For understanding, UCS components include UCS Manager for integrated system-level physical device management, Fabric interconnect and fabric extenders for 10 Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) with extension capabilities, blade servers and enclosures for energy efficiency and memory expansion for workloads and Virtual adapters for virtual host bus adapters (HBAs) and network interface controller (NIC) adapters for networked storage.

But there are apprehensions about how well is Cisco going to be accepted as a new player in this arena.

According to Tim Stammers, senior analyst at advisory and consulting firm Ovum, “Cisco has been hugely successful in the networking gear. Alongside the servers, Cisco is also promising networking gear that it says will simplify connections to racks of virtualized blade servers.”

He says this could mean Cisco server blades in the Nexus switch, eliminating complex I/O protocols between server application and network transport layers.

Gartner says, Cisco is differentiating itself in the systems market space, with a blade server and fabric interconnect as a single integrated management console. It is attempting to use virtualization to break up the traditional server architecture by recombining it with networking technologies as against point solution.

Thus with UCS, Cisco pits itself against HP as a leader, 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 C-Class and H-Class blades. The UCS virtual adapter competes with Virtual Connect and FlexIQ.

Additionally Cisco is betting that UCS's technological differences would beat the competition, but Gartner believes that to displace an incumbent vendor such as 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.

Further, 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 components.

What is important to note here is that 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.

Gartner believes this will inhibit Cisco from readily gaining more data center account control. UCS will need further integration and go-to-market efforts with solution vendors and independent software vendors (ISVs).

Given the point that only 6 per cent of the world's x86 servers are virtualized even today, and that holds good true for Indian market as well, and customers are still in the process of how to strategize and virtualize their servers, it would be a long drive for Cisco to control big accounts of data center business as the post-server consolidation-virtualization would focus on storage and desktop and then later move to their network infrastructure.