IBM's PureSystems mod boxes bust kilo-customer barrier Every market has its own psychological barrier, and for IBM systems the magic number seems to be 1,000. As part of the recent tweaks to its PureSystems line, Big Blue brags that it now has more than 1,000 unique customers worldwide using the new boxes. IBM did not supply any numbers regarding the volume of server nodes or …
.. that they were a net-new entrant to the server market! It is a long time since IBM, HP etc. were new to servers, Cisco can claim a historic achievement with the success of the Unified Computing System. incredible growth, a shock to the blade server market, and a game changer for data-center operations.
- Sum1
It is not as though Cisco was some unknown start up, new to servers that gained all of that market share based upon unique, game changing technology. They gained the x86 server market share because most every shop in the world uses Cisco networking and have a group of raving Cisco enthusiasts that they call network admins. Avaya is has way better telephony equipment than Cisco, but Cisco was able to gain substantial market share for the same reason... raving CCNAs that know Cisco is the answer before they have heard the question.... In addition to having network admins that are more loyal to their vendor than they are to their company, Cisco was also seeding UCS all over the place. If you did a major network buy of any sort, Cisco would give you a UCS chassis at no cost.... It is all a lock in play. Cisco sees Juniper, HP, Chinese networking companies offering similar functionality at a fraction of their cost. They want to wrap telephony, servers, management software, etc into the environment to make it more difficult to do a one to one comparison between 10g switches.
The irony in all of this is that all of the appliance or integration plays offered by Cisco, Oracle, EMC, even HP are exactly the opposite strategy of what they have been arguing on behalf of for 20 years. In order to combat a provider that made really awesome integrated systems, IBM, they told everyone that while integration may have some benefits, "best of breed" allows for greater pricing and technology flexibility...and is the way to go. Now that these "best of breed" players have saturated their markets, Cisco in networking, Oracle in DB, EMC in storage, they have decided to discover that integration requires far less system integration/admin and provides greater reliability. In other words, IBM was right and we led you down a path of unnecessary complexity and cost for the last 20 years... but, don't worry, we are going to create our own mainframe in an ad hoc manner... and call it VBlock.
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