Cisco has been pushing their UCS solutions and the reasons why are obvious.  They are trying to reinvent the datacenter.  Cisco wants to own not only the network gear, but the servers and cables they run on as well.  Some of the biggest obstacles I have with this push are a number of things.  Let’s start with proprietary architecture.  Everything from the blades themselves (which I was told are not rebranded HP’s) to each and every NIC and switch and the cables they run on.  And while I have no doubt from the various demo’s I have sat through that this is world class state-of-the-art solutions, this carries a significant capital figure with it.  And it is my opinion that most environments are too mixed for that kind of commitment.  Additionally, while the performance and dazzle are really incredible, the fact of the matter is that Cisco has never been characterized as excellent in the systems management area.  It’s a huge commitment. and despite the purported efficiencies and performance, well I see this growing pretty slowly amongst enterprises with existing heterogeneous environments for all of those above mentioned reasons.  However, as system lifecycles start to come up there may be some significant traction in this field, but we will also see the emergence of some serious alternatives, such as Xsigo and their virtual I/O offering which provides a much more open-standard approach and price point out of the box.  More on Xsigo in another article.

Recently, Citrix and Cisco have announced they have  teamed up to offer a VDI solution with claims of easier and cost effective benefits of deployment.  I find this interesting because Citrix has been stacking the Xensource platform vs VMWare offerings for a while now.  I find the same obstacles as in Cisco’s UCS offering in Citrix’s push against VMWare.  That being if the VMWare infrastructure, expertise, support, and investment are already in place, there had better be a compelling reason beyond performance for implementing their architecture. It’s no secret how pervasive VMWare is in the enterprise.  At this point, Citrix has one compelling reason that has caught my eye and it is something I am in the process of evaluating and that happens to be VDI.  The fact of the matter is that there are many many tangents in the world of VDI and that is what is so great about it and building it right and evaluating technologies for your individual environment.

And that brings me around to the purpose of the writing of this article.  It begs the following  questions among others and it shall be interesting to see where Citrix is going with this.  Will they veer towards a Cisco-dominated proprietary architecture or will they veer towards open standards?   Will an incentive-laden combined offering entice a significant portion of the market away from the VMWare world of offerings?  This could be a legitimate Cisco UCS strategy and one that could signal the  foothold Cisco has been looking for into real-world marketplaces that exist out there.  Will be interesting to watch, and much to evaluate.