Cisco should get serious about storage and Chuck some cash about Cisco should buy Nutanix, or Pure or both, and get itself a serious stake in storage for converged and hyper-convegred systems going forwards. What Cisco, with its UCS servers and converged/hyper-converged storage supplier partnerships is a raft of enterprise-class converged and hyper-converged system suppliers with more ( …
I think Tintri is the way to go. They have genuinely awesome storage software. Hardware is not as important. It will all be commodity in the near future. The only downside is that Tintri is playing in VMware and Microsoft's sandboxes. If Cisco really wants to break out of being a VMware and Microsoft infrastructure provider, then they need Nutanix. Actually Nutanix is the way to go, changed my mind, VMware has their guns pointed at Cisco and Cisco is within range. They need to break that VMware dependency before VMware does to them what they did to Sun Micro.
I couldn't disagree more. This is the same as saying Cisco needed to buy HP or DELL to enter the x86 server business. I mean who the hell was Nuova/UCS 6 years ago, right?
You can spend big bucks and go down fast, like HP (Compaq, Palm, EDS, ... not to mention leading SW Autonomy) and so many other have find out so many times... and I fear DELL will soon too.
Big acquistions are no way safer, nor in any way imply more sucess. Cisco most sucessfull product have often come from small developments and acquistions (Crescendo, Andiamo, Nuova, Webex, Meraki, Aironet, ...)
to be fair, storage is a little more different to servers: Cisco was already in the server business to a great degree prior to UCS, albeit servers with lots of IO ports.
You can buy a company and expand (eg Dell with Equallogic and Compellent) or you can build from the ground up (eg Cisco with UCS). It's harder to build from ground up with storage because of the proprietary RAID, caching, snapshotting, replication and virtualization algorithms. The GUI is the easy part.
Exactly, when we say servers (post-Unix era), we mean commodity Intel hardware which anyone can design in a couple of weeks. Storage sounds like hardware, but it actually means software. Cisco doesn't have a solid/any storage management software... they are relying on VMware, who is trying to kill them. Difficult to "partner" long term with someone who is chasing you with a butcher's knife.
A storage pure play company is going to really struggle in a couple of years, they are no more immune to public cloud eroding their customer base from one side, while hyperconverged erodes it from the other than EMC were - hence the need for the DELL merger. Pure, Nimble, NetApp, Tegile etc are especially vulnerable I'd have thought.
Neither Simplivity nor Nutanix need Cisco to succeed, so I don't know whether it would be in their best interests.
Nimble may well be a good shout given the low share price, other wise I'd wait it out and wait for the value of all those storage only companies to start deprecating, which I think is almost inevitable.
They have the C240 M4 which is a megabeast Windows Storage server or VMware virtual SAN or OpenStack Swift all SSD/Flash array with 24 drives and enough PCIe slots for massive cache. 8 of those will rip all the doors, windows and roof tops off of any competitor (I've tested).
They have near-line storage as well in the C3260 which is a 52 drive storage beastie for storage teiring. Again, Windows Storage Server, Virtual SAN or Swift.
For hyper-converged they have their own storage for high performance... No nutanix needed. They also have their own OpenStack mainframe with full storage built in.
Basically, Cisco did it right. Instead of wasting money on third party storage systems, they just waited for all the virtualization solutions to ship with their own software defined stacks and frankly, they just work better. With Veeam, they have all they need.
So while all the other vendors of storage will probably go tits up in the next few years, Cisco is able to avoid wasting that money.
P.S. Azure Stack on Cisco UCS gives a two vendor solution to nearly every major business problem and performance like no one has ever seen before. VMware's solution is about 6 years behind, and the #1 reason other storage vendors exist, but it's pretty good for an antique. Swift on top of GlusterFS is amazing.
Quit talking about thing you obviously don't understand.
This is all very valid and I agree with it all. However, I don't agree with you saying Cisco is not wasting money... Whiptail? Ok they may lose less than the other vendors in the long run, but they've still made costly mistakes along the way.
Also still think a Nimble purchase wouldn't be bad and would only strengthen their converged stack offering.
Note: I work for a competitor.
Cisco is a supplier of Fibre Channel SAN switching and management, and today cooperates with and meets in the channel a number of storage suppliers. I was really concerned as a competitor what Cisco could do with Whiptail, but it seemed from outside like the backlash from that deal in Cisco's relationships with other storage companies impacted Cisco's commitment to making Whiptail work.
Given that storage, particularly the kind of storage you'd closely couple to the server or make part of the server cluster in the way Whiptail could have been, has a new entrant in the form of server resident persistent memory, it seems to me that Cisco would be far better off entering this new segment as it emerges than in risking the backlash from current partners if it acquires an established leader (NetApps for example) or an emerging solid state array company (Pure, Nimble, etc).
@FStevenChalmers
Controversial as it may seem today, this has always been the source of their growth. Storage is a sideshow. The real threat is Huawei. Cisco should just get the biggest fattest investment bank to New York a way to buy the ground Huawei is standing on.
OK, that's enough Cisco Should Buy, now.
Not sure why this article left out Nimble in terms of an acquisition. It's the best acquisition Cisco could make if it wants to get into the networked storage space. Has both a modern hybrid and AFA, at par or exceeding the capabilities of all the new players in the market currently - all at a discounted market rate.
They'd get more for less than if they bought Pure. And their campus is also right next to Cisco!
They need to get into the hypervisor game. VMware, Microsoft and Red Hat are building storage software into the hypervisors. That is basically every single workload. After they take hold, storage is a commodity. The only way Cisco gets into that game is to buy Nutanix and try to give the hypervisor game a go... or they could roll their own Red Hat, KVM distro and start giving away the support with SmartNet support buys, no additional charge... try to take the Linux game down.
Cisco has a problem with somehow thinking they could add value to SSD in some way that's not been thought of already. Unlikely, given the decades of IP bound up in the existing storage players like EMC and HPE. They'd be like a grocer and a banana - the only value they'd add would be a bruise.
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