Re: Cisco UCS
The irony in all of this is that all of the appliance or integration plays offered by Cisco, Oracle, EMC, even HP are exactly the opposite strategy of what they have been arguing on behalf of for 20 years. In order to combat a provider that made really awesome integrated systems, IBM, they told everyone that while integration may have some benefits, "best of breed" allows for greater pricing and technology flexibility...and is the way to go. Now that these "best of breed" players have saturated their markets, Cisco in networking, Oracle in DB, EMC in storage, they have decided to discover that integration requires far less system integration/admin and provides greater reliability. In other words, IBM was right and we led you down a path of unnecessary complexity and cost for the last 20 years... but, don't worry, we are going to create our own mainframe in an ad hoc manner... and call it VBlock.