Cisco Enters Blade Server Business, Ecosystem

Cisco has introduced a new data center architecture that moves it directly into the blade server and computing architecture business. That inevitably means Cisco now competes in some new areas with the likes of Hewlett-Packard and IBM.

Cisco says it has designed an entirely new class of computing system incorporating the new Cisco UCS B-Series blades based on the Intel Nehalem processor families. The Cisco Unified Computing System also essentially consolidates what today are three separate networks: local area networks (LANs), storage area networks (SANs) and high performance computing networks, into a single fabric.

By supporting "virtualization," allowing multiple apps to run on a single server, Cisco's move also suggests some further changes. Though up to this point most important business applications have been run on dedicated hardware, in the future apps might typically run on standard hardware.

For those of you with some decades of experience in the communications business, that might suggest an evolution of most parts of the business towards "software" rather than dedicated machines. Where once a Class 5 switch was a discrete machine, in the future the equivalent applications might run much as other enterprise apps do: on standard hardware platforms, using Ethernet as the transmission layer.

That might lead to rather widespread repositioning. Many companies commonly thought of as "hardware" providers might come to be better known as enterprise or carrier "software" firms, with less direct bundling of the hardware on which the applications execute. At that point, an enterprise class data center becomes a carrier switching center. You can then envision new ways for contestants to build the foundation for a communications business.

That doesn't mean the existing financial, legal and regulatory issues go away. Those key elements of the business context must be addressed. But core communications features might shift to a more software-focused mode, without the requirement for dedicated hardware. This probably is a longish sort of transition. But the direction increasingly is clear.

To the extent that the Cisco architecture incorporates a number of discrete networking protocols such as Storage Area Networking and LANs, the ecosystem further might create some new entry points for wide area network providers into the enterprise computing and LAN business as well.

That trend likewise will take some time to develop. In principle, though, it should in the future be easier to integrate "data center" and "central office" apps in a more unified way. Big stuff.