And So Begins the Next Mainframe Saga
People who purchase data center equipment should pay close attention to Cisco Systems’ new server product. Cisco’s industry-rattling move portends great change for the ways in which hardware and software arrive at businesses.
“There is a new architecture being developed that is really revolutionary,” Bob Beauchamp, the chief executive of BMC, told me in a recent interview. “I think that represents a very significant threat to I.B.M. and H.P. who have business model issues associated with a new architecture.”
Cisco has yet to specify exactly what it will ship. But my conversations with numerous people familiar with Cisco’s plans peg its new product, likely due in March, as a large cabinet filled with servers, switches and storage systems, along with bundled virtualization and management software. Cisco looks to ship the fastest virtualization system on the planet by teaming standard hardware components with some specialized hardware developed by the team it acquired when the company bought the hardware start-up Nuova Systems.
:
