With the announcement last month of its Unified Computing System, Cisco Systems Inc. jumped into the data center market, taking on the likes of Hewlett Packard Co. and IBM. On Thursday it embraced a standardized approach and explained its differentiation: ROI.
Cisco marketing executives laid out pricing details of the system during a virtual event on Thursday. The UCS, which combines networking, blade servers and virtualization into one, runs about half a million dollars – about one-third of the price of the competition, because it reduces tenfold the number of required Ethernet and Fibre Channel switches, management modules and software licenses, Cisco says. In comparison, a typical 320-blade configuration from a market leader cost about $1.6 million.
Meanwhile, executives said, the Cisco system offers twice the memory.
In short: more bang for the carrier buck.
During the event, speakers also addressed concerns that the UCS would be a closed, proprietary system. "That's absolutely not the case. It was purposely built as an integrated system with each layer conforming to industry standards,” said Soni Jiadani, vice president of the server access and virtualization group for Cisco. "We're putting to bed the myths out there.”
