Rivals respond to Cisco’s Data Centre Move

HP and other competitors warn that Cisco’s entry into the data centre business could be harmful for user choice

“Would you let a plumber build your house?” Jim Ganthier, HP’s vice president of Infrastructure Software and Blades, told eWEEK via e-mail. “Cisco’s network-centric view of the data center is great for bandwidth management, but leaves a lot to chance in terms of service level delivery as well as data reliability and accessibility.

Cisco’s converged data and storage networking requires Cisco’s Data Center Ethernet (DCE), Mehta said, thus eliminating freedom of choice with a sole-source Cisco-only server and network.

Research director Jim Frey of Enterprise Management Associates told eWEEK that he sees two key implications for the networking market.

“First, this sets a new high-water mark for integrating networking technologies more tightly into computing and storage architectures — something only Cisco is in a position to pull off — that may represent a true second generation of convergence (first gen was voice/data networking),” Frey said.

“Secondly, this aggressive move into computing raises the likelihood that other blade providers, most notably HP and IBM, will seek to find and energise alternatives to Cisco. HP has a good option with their ProCurve products, but IBM does not have an immediate answer. In the end, it will force competitive innovation in networking technologies, which is good for everyone.”