In case you had not heard, Cisco has announced they are getting into the server business. According to the New York Times, Cisco will release a server product within the next few months. (Some blogs are reporting as early as March). The new servers will be designed 100% for use as hosts to VMware’s ESX Server. From a technology perspective I find this exciting and believe this will drive innovation from IBM, HP and Dell. I do have one area of concern though…
At VMWorld 2007, John Chambers made a fantastic keynote presentation of Cisco’s new concept called Datacenter 3.0. I found the presentation to paint a very exciting picture of where virtualization was taking the IT world. With virtualized Servers, Storage and Networks, the computing “Cloud” is a reality. I am a little concerned to learn his vision may not be one of an open, standards based, ecosystem; but possibly one of a proprietary construct.
We will keep an eye on this and report back as new information becomes available.
The *key* advantage for the upcoming Cisco project called “California” will be FULL memory access. Therefore, each VM will have access to the full amount of memory. The server will be built from off-the-shelf components with only one custom component. Cisco worked closely with Intel and VMware to build this highly specialized “blade server.”
Real use for this product will be VMs that require full access to memory that current servers do not deliver.