Eye on Blades Blog: Trends in Infrastructure : Cisco

Three Opinions (But One Counts More)

Daniel Bowers — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 23:32:00 GMT

I saw three new opinions about BladeSystem last week. First, PC World Latin America announced that the HP BL490c G6 virtualization blade won in the "Best Server" category of the annual PC World Latin America 2009 Awards . These awards honor...(read more)

DCE = Deprecated

Daniel Bowers — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 16:15:00 GMT

If I'm interpreting the comments from Bob Nusbaum correctly, then Cisco has decided to stop using the term "DCE" (Data Center Ethernet), and will use the terms "CEE" or "DCB" going forward. That's a good move. As...(read more)

A lesson in economics – Price Transparency

kendallmblog — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 01:09:00 GMT

It doesn’t happen often, but here is one of those situations in life where that dismal science, economics, can be useful and fun. First a little definition …. Price transparency is defined as a situation in which both buyer and seller know...(read more)

Is this UCS confusion...or dandruff?

Daniel Bowers — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 16:04:00 GMT

On Wednesday, Soni Jiandani announced an expansion of Cisco’s UCS family , adding rack servers to their hardware roadmap. I’m really scratching my head at this move. Soni says that her goal with these products – 1U and 2U servers each...(read more)

Virtually (and literally) #1

Daniel Bowers — Fri, 22 May 2009 13:41:00 GMT

This week we released VMMark results for the new HP BL490c G6 server blade. The scores establish the BL490c as the highest performing 2-socket server blade for virtualization -- eclipsing blades offered by IBM, Dell, and Cisco. By the way, this 2-socket...(read more)

Why is Matrix important? Innovation, integration and execution

newtonja — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 14:52:00 GMT

Now that the Oracle/Sun news is taking a breath, I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge some folks who paid attention and to add some other thoughts about why Matrix is important. ...(read more)

Mike Klayko, CEO of Brocade nailed it

newtonja — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 16:49:00 GMT

I'm a sucker for unscripted honesty. Kudos to Mr. K for taking a deep breath after Cisco's UCS and Project California grandstanding to put some reality in front of the rhetoric. In less than 3 minutes, he really boiled all the hype down and simply articulated what a lot of our customers and partners are thinking too. Watch his video....(read more)

Did we miss something?

Gary Thome — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 21:35:00 GMT

Every time a competitor introduces a new major product we can't help but notice they suddenly get very interested in what HP is blogging during the weeks prior to their announcement. Then when they announce, the story is always a big self-congratulatory "we've figured out what the problem is with existing server/blade architectures". The implication being that blades volume adoption is somehow being constrained by the very thing they have. ...(read more)

Builder versus Plumber

newtonja — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Rob Enderle recently added some great insight into a question we posed a couple of weeks ago, "What If a Plumber Built Your House". When thinking about the question if you wanted a plubmer to build your house, he answered with "maybe". Here are some of Rob's excellent points from his post, "Cisco, EMC and VMware: Cloud Computing Could Bring Strange Bedfellows", plus our thoughts....(read more)

What if a plumber built your house?

newtonja — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 22:51:00 GMT

Plumbing, building a house and the Lippis Report 119: Are Cisco, HP and IBM on Data Center Collision Course? Some things to think about. ...(read more)

Desperately Seeking Virtual I/O

newtonja — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 11:11:00 GMT

Our friends at Dell are at it again. In case you don’t pay as much attention to the happenings in the blade world as we do, here’s a recap. Dell has been chasing the HP BladeSystem for some time now. Though bamboozled on several fronts, the search for a competitive virtual I/O solution to Virtual Connect has been the most elusive. Here’s the retrospective from March 2008 to February 2009....(read more)