If there's one thing IBM doesn't need right now, it's another competitor jumping into the blade server market. Too bad. Networking giant Cisco Systems wants a bigger bite of the data center budget at exactly the same time that Hewlett-Packard has been ramping up its blade sales and Dell and Sun Microsystems are getting some …

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Monday 9th March 2009 20:52 GMT Anonymous Coward

Marketing Hype

All of this sounds good. But recall that Cisco was also going to take over the SAN market with a FibreChannel Switch line that went nowhere. Cisco had to buy network and ATM switch companies to get into those markets. Which blade server company have they bought? That would be a useful piece of information for the Register to provide!!!!!!!

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Monday 9th March 2009 21:00 GMT Anonymous Coward

Big fat x64 blades

"The other rumor is about the blade itself, supposedly a big, fat x64 with more memory than is traditionally put on a blade server, which would make it amenable to massive server consolidation through virtualization tools, presumably also from VMware."

Funny, when Sun released the Sun Blade 8000, everyone said "it's too big". Let's see what Cisco will bring...

It will be interesting to see how Sun's OpenNetwork initiative will play out.

Don't dismiss Sun's advantage to have only one codebase to maintain (networking, storage, virtualization), namely OpenSolaris. This will be a huge advantage for the next couple of years.

And you will really get everything from one vendor.

Go Sun!

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Tuesday 10th March 2009 10:32 GMT Magellan

Cisco's SAN switches "went nowhere"?

Cisco has about 50% market share in SAN Directors (big modular switches). In overall SAN revenue (both director switches and top of rack SAN edge switches), Cisco has significant market share.

It is fair to say Cisco's success in the SAN business is what forced Brocade to buy McData and Foundry.

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Tuesday 10th March 2009 10:32 GMT Mikel

HP is not worried

Not about this and not about IBM's 8Gb/s SAN connection.

HP shrunk the SAN and put it _inside_ the server blade. 8Gb/s and 100k IOPS in 320GB as a blade internal mezzanine module. Use up to three per blade. Up to 256 per 42U rack, for an aggregate bandwidth of You've Got to be Kidding Me. Oh - and the thing draws five watts.

http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/storageworks/io_accelerator/index.html

Oops. The game changed again.

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Tuesday 10th March 2009 10:32 GMT Jan

Don´t mention ze SUN...

...or the Bryant will come out.

more on topic: How much more memory than 128GB (IBM LS42, HP BL495c) will they fit onto a blade? How much more can you really use?

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Tuesday 10th March 2009 10:50 GMT al

Re: HP is not worried

Dude, this author is not concerned about HP or Dell or other datacenter vendors.

just look at author's article history and you'll see that he just needs an excuse to talk about big blue and position some of the products @el reg. El reg doesn't have any other journos who can talk in-depth about servers & data center like Timmy - so they have to bear with him - or - something like that.

Paris, coz she is not worried about (san fran)cisco either.

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Tuesday 10th March 2009 14:43 GMT Anonymous Coward

IBM planing to claw back market share? Doubtful

<<... New switches and connectivity adapters from partners as well as new "Nehalem" blades are going to be the key to that effort. ...>>

If IBM really believes that they can claw back market share with this, they are clearly mistaken.

Firstly, partners provide the same stuff to IBM, HP and Dell, so that's not a differentiator. Secondly, IBM is typically 3rd to market with Intel chip releases, after Dell then HP. Again, no differentiator.

IBM has lost blade share to HP due to the fact that their product is simply not as good. It's not as reliable (passive midplane, power supply setup), doesn't have enterprise class features without sacrificing density (eg. hot swap drives), lacks scalability (DIMM density vs Dell blades) and is more expensive than HP's offering. Dell's comes a close second to HP's in quality and scalability and is the price-performance leader in this space.

Now, is IBM worried about Cisco getting into the blades business? Of course not. The majority of profit for IBM comes from Unix and mainframe hardware and their extensive software and services businesses. The x86/x64 business is just there to keep all IBM shops all-IBM .

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Tuesday 10th March 2009 14:43 GMT Dan JOhnson

This'll prove to be a mistake by Cisco

What can they possibly be thinking jumping into the already crowded and established x86 market? And especially at this time. I think they probably mde the decision to do this a while back and are probably wishing they could put it all on hold until the economy gets better.

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Tuesday 10th March 2009 22:06 GMT Matt Bryant

RE: Big fat x64 blades & Don´t mention ze SUN...

RE: RE: Big fat x64 blades

"....Don't dismiss Sun's advantage to have only one codebase to maintain (networking, storage, virtualization), namely OpenSolaris. This will be a huge advantage for the next couple of years...." What big advantage? You mean the one that Linux has had for years already? Please do tell your own customers first as they're buying Galaxy with Linux at five times the rate of Galaxy with Slowaris x86.

"....And you will really get everything from one vendor....." Yes, you can get a slow OS, overpriced and poorly-performing kit, and little management software that doesn't integrate with other Sun or other vendors' products. Or you could buy the best blades solution, the leading storage solutions, and the best management software, all from hp, and all at a better price.

Regarding the article, CISCO do need a new market as they are not making the money they used to in just the networking kit. Interestingly, they already partner with IBM on the storage virtualisation front, so maybe they could use IBM storage arrays to fill the one massive gap in CISCO's offering - no storage. IBM and hp dominate the blades scene because they can actually put the whole shebang in as a complete solution. For CISCO to break into the blades market in any real way they will need to bring a complete solution to the table, so they need that storage piece yet.

RE: Don´t mention ze SUN...

Told you lot before - you lay off the gormless Sunshiner posts and I won't feel the need to show you up.

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