I just read on Silicon Republic that Cisco plans to get into server virtualisation to compete against the likes of HP and IBM. They’re planning by being on the market by March (probably the USA initially).
That’s a strange move. Server sales are not exactly going to increase. In fact, with a global recession there’s not going to be a big market. Cisco don’t have a reputation in either the server or virtualisation markets. In fact, many people are not exactly big fans of Cisco – some would say they take good products and make them expensive and complicate support unnecessarily. They’re also going up against established competitors.
Cisco is aiming at the data centre market where they already have a good presence in the network equipment market space. The Register thinks that Cisco will use VMware as their software because they own 2% of the company. The challenge will be in developing unified management. Cisco, if they play it right, might be able to integrate physical with virtual network management. I’m guessing the price of a Cisco solution will be significant and a major obstacle.