'Cisco wasn't crazy when it announced UCS'

BANGALORE. INDIA: Two years after joining the fray in blade server market, Cisco proved wrong, all who 'said UCS would never succeed' and "the rampant speculation that Cisco had taken a crazy path to doom and destruction", when it announced its first Unified Computing Sytem (UCS) in 2009, writes Soni Jiandani, VP, Server Access and Virtualization Business Unit at Cisco, in her blog.

She notes, 'Businesses worldwide shifted over 10 per cent of the x86 blade market to UCS, and in the US it was nearly 20 per cent."

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As per the recent IDC report Cisco outpaced market growth for x86 blade to become the #3 player worldwide in x86 blade server factory revenue.

Moreover, in its recent earnings call, Cisco reported 5,400 UCS customers and an annualized order run rate of $900M for UCS product orders, she adds.

"As we began our design efforts, we knew we couldn’t set out to design simply another server. We heard from our customers that power, management, and server administration costs were sapping their budgets, leaving few resources for innovation. So we included customers in R&D sessions to help us design from the ground up an evolutionary new system that integrated networking and management:  flexible and scalable enough to handle any workload.  We aimed to create the ideal, programmable, platform for virtualized and cloud environments, and to help solve many of the very real challenges they faced," she says.