The Technology Life

Question: How do you invade corporate data centers? Answer: You get really cozy, really quickly with data center software companies like VMware and Oracle. That’s part of the strategy unfolding at Cisco Systems Inc., which will have a major presence at the VMworld and Oracle OpenWorld conferences in San Francisco. Here’s the analysis.

Let’s start with some background: Cisco Systems’ Unified Computing System strategy converges storage, networking and servers in the data center. At first glance, UCS is off to a strong start. Just last week, Tech Data CEO Bob Dutkowsky told The VAR Guy that demand for Cisco’s server solutions appeared strong. Moreover, Cisco has been building closer relationships with folks like VMware and EMC.

Still, Cisco CEO John Chambers delivered a cautious tone during a mid-August 2010 earnings call with analysts. Chambers is upbeat about Cisco’s product lineup but he remains concerned about mixed signals from the economy and customers.

A Surprise At Oracle OpenWorld?

Instead of bowing to the economy, Cisco is going on the offensive and will have a major presence at both VMworld (Aug. 30 – Sept. 2, San Francisco) and Oracle OpenWorld (Sept. 19-23, San Francisco).

In fact, The VAR Guy is hearing rumors that Cisco and Oracle may potentially announce some enhanced business strategies at OpenWorld. Hmmm… Could the rumored effort involve Cisco UCS leveraging Oracle VM virtualization? That’s a definite maybe. Regardless, the Cisco-Oracle relationship requires a delicate balancing act, especially as Cisco’s server and storage business potentially competes with Oracle’s Sun businesses.

Lots of VMworld Noise

Meanwhile, Cisco is set to invade VMworld, where the networking company will talk about its cloud-enabled technology, updates to the Nexus 1000V, new services, and of course, the Cisco UCS alignment with VMware’s Cloud Service director.

Cisco will seemingly be everywhere at VMworld, with Cisco executives scheduled to speak in at least six separate sessions.

The networking king, it seems, wants to become the data center king. And Cisco’s best chance for success, The VAR Guy believes, requires closer working relationships with major software companies like Oracle and VMware.

Additional reporting from David Courbanou. Sign up for The VAR Guy’s Newsletter; Webcasts and Resource Center; and via RSS; Facebook; Identi.ca; Twitter and VARtweet.

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Game On!

Very interesting comparison

Cisco’s newer Nexus family are non-blocking switches, but even if companies have made the investment in Nexus, they will need to spend more money and re-architect their environments if they add FabricPath when it is available in Q3 ‘10.  Both Juniper – with its Project Stratus and “3-2-1″ data center architecture – and HP (3Com) – with its Intelligent Resilient Framework (IRF) – have alternatives that companies should evaluate when making the move to a 10GbE next generation of switches and architecture. Cisco, HP and Juniper have dramatically different approaches to architecting nextgen networks. In short, Cisco wants to maintain its substantial lock-in advantage, HP wants to bomb pricing and Juniper wants to disrupt everything so it can steal share. Customers should understand that no matter which path they choose for virtualizing networks, they must plan for disruption and look toward developer-friendly, multi-vendor, best-of-breed solutions to minimize lock-in.

Will you Rip and Replace your Cisco network?

Cisco is furthering their commitment to the SMB and the channel by introducing Cisco Smart Storage. It’s a family of “affordable” network storage solutions, all integrated with business applications. It’s also designed to be “highly secure” and to share sensitive data. If you’re VAR targeting SMBs with less than 100 employees, read on…

Competition in the SMB market has been particularly fierce lately. In April 2010, both Cisco and HP used their respective partner conferences to evangelize more SMB moves.

Now, Cisco is back with the NSS 300 series. Two, four and six-bay network storage units are available to provide SMB users with the appropriate amount of space they need. Cisco noted that using 2TB drives, you can max it out at 12TB of data capacity, but higher capacities will be available when bigger drives debut.

Some of the integrated business applications (which are expandable in the future) include a completely user-configurable Web Server with an integrated WordPress publishing platform, plus built-in server management and web-based configuration. There’s also the ability for Cisco Smart Storage to have secure remote Web access to critical business data, along with on-disk data encryption. File sharing is supported across “popular operating systems” or re-purposed as an iSCSI target for virtualization and clusters.

I spoke with Andrew Sage, VP of Small Business Sales Worldwide at Cisco and he briefly went over some of the points of profitability for VARs and partners..

“We’ve made it easy to deploy — and we don’t expect many small business customers [would deploy] this on their own [but] it’s not complex. We’ve designed support to help the partners hit the ground running with support [and we believe there's a lot of] value proposition in these products.”

Cisco has also designed the ability to wrap professional services around the deployment of the business applications on the NSS 300. As you’d guess, Cisco is providing support and services to partners selling the NSS 300 series, including tech and online support and next-day hardware replacement.

It’s available worldwide now, and the price tag on the devices range from from $913 to $5,625 depending on the model, and then the Small Business Pro Service is $149 for most of the NSS 300 configurations.

Sign up for The VAR Guy’s Newsletter; Webcasts and Resource Center; and via RSS; Facebook; Identi.ca; Twitter and VARtweet.

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Advancing the DataCenter solutions stack from Cisco.

Cisco, NetApp, and VMware have teamed up to deliver next-generation dynamic data centers today. This includes the industry’s first end-to-end secure multi-tenancy solution that helps transform IT silos into shared infrastructure.

NetApp, Cisco and VMware have teamed up to create a virtualised data centre architecture featuring “best of breed” technology from all three firms.

The venture marks the first time that Cisco, VMware and NetApp have pooled resources – a collaboration that has resulted in the creation of the Secure Multi-Tenancy Design Architecture.

The architecture, explained the vendors, has been designed to improve efficiency and security within the virtualised data centre environment for customers wanting to deploy cloud solutions.

Paul Maritz, president and chief executive at VMware, explained: “The dynamic data centre built on VMware vSphere, along with Cisco and NetApp technologies, will provide the foundation for both private and public clouds and the ability to move data and applications between these clouds.”

Only mutual partners of all three firms will be authorised to sell the architecture, explained John Rollason, head of product, alliances and solutions marketing EMEA at NetApp.

He said: “Customers can purchase the hardware and software for the Secure Multi-tenancy Architecture from a broad partner ecosystem, which consists of the three companies’ mutual system integrators and channel partners.”

Logicalis UK, a partner of all three vendors, has welcomed the collaboration's “mutual partners only” stance.

Tom Kelly, managing director at Logicalis UK, said: “I make no apologies for the access we will have [to the architecture] over our competitors because we have invested significant amounts of money in these partnerships.”

Our colleague Ellen Messmer has heard some scuttlebutt concerning Cisco acquiring Rohati Systems. She notes that, while neither Cisco nor Rohati have officially commented on such a deal, a high-level insider has confirmed that it has happened (and that the employees are actually over at Cisco now.)

The acquisition of start-up Rohati Systems would make sense. Rohati was started by former Cisco engineers in 2008 to introduce an access-control device that’s an alternative to the traditional firewall.

(See Cisco Defectors for a rundown of what other former Cisco employees are up to these days).

Rohati’s Transaction Networking System helps establish entitlements by controlling through its Layer 7 access method who has what access to data on a per-transaction basis using context-specific attributes. Rohati has also been working on a version of its technology for use in cloud-based environments.

As we know, Cisco spent 2009 slowly building an image of itself as a cloud security vendor, referring to cloud security as a "nightmare" and then introducing enhancements to WebEx and the ASR line to tackle the issue. So from this perspective, Cisco's interest in Rohati also makes sense.

Rohati is based in Sunnyvale, Calif. and its president, CEO and co-founder is Prashant Gandhi. He is reportedly planning on staying on with Cisco.

^{Posted by Cisco Subnet editor Julie Bort:}

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--> --> --> --> Cisco (NSDQ:CSCO)'s choice to add Avnet (NYSE:AVT) as a distributor for Cisco data center products stems from the fact that Avnet is in a "unique position in the industry to support Cisco's virtualization and server growth."

That was the word from Dave O'Callaghan, Cisco vice president of distribution, worldwide channels, who joined Avnet executives to discuss the Avnet move with Channelweb.com Thursday afternoon.

"They have a partner base centered around the data center," O'Callaghan said. "And the technical services and capabilities of Avnet and the Phoenix facilities are second to none in this area. Plus, the marketing that [Avnet] does around verticals in this segment is strong."

Jeff Bawol, president of Avnet Technology Solutions, Americas, added that Cisco product and services would be a good addition to Avnet's SolutionsPath, which is a series of training programs for VARs in areas like virtualization, health care and government. He touched on Avnet planning to build a dedicated business unit to Cisco products that will be headed by Chris Swahn, vice president and the unit's general business manager.

Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS) is a collection of Cisco products that centers around new Cisco B-series blade and C-series rackmount servers, and looks to integrate storage, server, virtualization and networking capabilities in one package. The UCS debuted in March 2009, and in late October, Cisco confirmed distribution agreements with Westcon Group, Ingram Micro (NYSE:IM) and Tech Data (NSDQ:TECD).

O'Callaghan said that the choice to add Avnet wasn't a reflection of anything those distributors weren't already doing, but the opportunity to add a distributor whose "selling motion" is in the data center. The Avnet relationship will cover North America and Canada, he explained.

"The three you mentioned are the globals, and they give us great reach to be able to extend our supply chain throughout the world." O'Callaghan said. "We also have a set of regionals and specialty distributors. Avnet is a high-value distributor, and [Cisco's data center] products are not a direct-model opportunity. The need for tech support and the partner base is there. Avnet has built vertical solutions around health care and other areas, and that's exciting to us. We thought Avnet was a step ahead of all other distributors in that area."

There would appear to be other options; Arrow ECS, for example, is EMC (NYSE:EMC)'s largest North American distributor and VMware's largest worldwide distributor.

But O'Callaghan said that Cisco would not be seeking additional distribution relationships in North America in the short-term.

"Avnet will be our high-value, high-end distributor in the U.S. and Canada," he said. "We have added other distributors along the way for other specialties. D&H in the small business world, for example. I think you can draw a parallel between that and Avnet. This is their world, and they're uniquely positioned in their partner base. Cisco sees the seling motion of Avnet as allowing us to capture opportunities in the virtualization and data center better than we could through existing distribution relationships."

O'Callaghan added that Cisco studied Avnet's VAR base and found that "many Cisco VARs had a relationship with Avnet already."

"There was an incremental base of VARs that have not embraced the network historically, and lived in the storage and server world particularly," he said.

"I think there'll be some natural attraction," added Bawol, referring to existing Avnet VARs who would be interested in selling Cisco for the first time. "Dave's got a great channel working already and our goal is not to disrupt that channel. But we think we've been successful in the Americas and that there'll be some [attraction]. It's an incremental goal."

Under the distribution deal, Avnet will carry Cisco's Nexus data center family of switches, the MDS family of fiber channel SAN switches, Catalyst E-Blade switches, Unified Computing System (UCS) blade and rack servers, Application Control Engine (ACE) and WAN Optimization (WAAS) products.

Avnet is one of Hewlett Packard's top North American distributors, and the addition of Cisco to Avnet's line card also means another new front in the escalating HP-Cisco rivalry.

"We've always managed competitive vendors, and we focus our line card on players who are number one," Bawol said. "Our reach into the data center is going beyond a classic infrastructure person to those who have a business around data center management. So it's become glaringly apparent to us that we need to have all the products available to move partners to the data center. Candidly, Cisco was one of the right products for us from a distribution standpoint. Very candidly, our goal is not to shift a bunch of business from HP or IBM or any of the other industry guys we have. Our structure is incremental."

Did Avnet have conversations with HP, IBM and other Cisco data center rivals it carries?

"The short answer is yes we have. You wouldn't expect people who have multi-decade relationships not to discuss their business together," Bawol said. "It would be wrong for them to find Cisco on us and have it be a surprise. We had dialogue and they were aware of the situation. They understand that Cisco is entering the market and that it's our desire to provide the fullest solution for partners at all times."

How is adding Avnet a competitive advantage for Cisco over HP and IBM?

"As John Chambers has pointed out, the network is becoming the platform for everything. He has 30 adjacencies for us, and our virtualization and data center initiative is one of those," O'Callaghan added. "The decision on what's valuable will be made by the partner and end customer."

Next: Implications for VBlock and Cisco, EMC, VMware