Nine months ago, I started to build a house. This week was all about tying up loose ends. We're only days away from moving in. One such loose end was the mystery of the missing faucet.  It was a cool bronze faucet I picked up on eBay for a song.  Forgotten in my trunk, I never gave it to the plumber. 

As the plumber came today to install it, he handed me a change order for $175 - something about the valve and trim weren't compatible!?!  The faucet was in and the plumber was out in five minutes flat. He also warned me not to cry to him if it breaks. Sigh. 

I'm really glad my plumber didn't build my house.

• The house budget would have come in just shy of a one billion dollars. I promise you, on a per hour basis, my plumber walked away with 10x more profit than my builder.
• Faucets would have been the focal point of every room.  I even suspect the pipes would be outside of the walls.
• All pipes and faucets would be made of 24k gold.  The rest of the house, crape paper.

If you want to build a house, hire a custom builder.  They can see your vision. They grasp the big picture and they know how to bring the pieces together.  Most importantly, they know how to execute it.  Custom builders also know your budget and they don't get paid if they bust it. 

That brings me to this article today from Lippis group.  The title is "Are Cisco, HP and IBM on Data Center Collision Course?" It's clear to me that Cisco is taking a plumbers' view to the next generation datacenter. Or a "packet plumber" view if you will. 

This article does a great job of posing some interesting questions of Cisco while clearly drawing the lines between different approaches already being executed in the market, i.e. Adaptive Infrastructure.  James Staten at Forrester echoed some of these sentiments in a recent post as well.

Here are some of the quotes and questions that popped out to me:

• "Cisco’s Data Center 3.0 initiative is its vision to orchestrate virtual IT." - What data center is virtual only?  Convergence is needed in the data center - not divergence.  Virtual and physcial can not be addressed separately with different tools, processes, etc.  There needs to be a master plan for physical and virtual to minimize the proliferation of different tools, control conflicts and poorly managed processes.
• "Its products include the Nexus family of data center switches including the Nexus 7000, a high-density 10Gbs Ethernet core switch; Nexus 5000 . . . "  followed by "Cisco Nexus family provides customers with a granular path to add capacity and capabilities to the data center network while allowing customers to have the ability to leverage their existing and continued investment in Catalyst." The granular path is a little unclear here for Catalyst and IOS folks.  Exactly how does Cisco's vision include the millions of Catalyst and IOS products out there? 
• "But here’s the rub: business models."  Quite a rub indeed.  HP has a proven history of driving out cost across the data center.  Possibly the only player in that can do it on all four axis in the data center - compute, storage, networking, and facilities.  Will Cisco drive down network costs the way HP has driven down compute and facilities costs?  We think it takes a lot more effort than addressing FCoE to get there. 

The final assertion I saw was that Cisco thinks that "HP and IBM will be painted as legacy data center players."  I guess I'm okay with that as our legacy. 

HP knows data centers.  Cisco knows networks.  Which one do you want to build your house?