Cisco’s California Project: Redhat more important than VMware for its UCS strategy!
By Tarry Singh at 17 March, 2009, 7:01 am
This is what I conclude from Matt’s post, although he goes in detail on how open source will eventually win, more here:
Intriguingly, Cisco’s Unified Computing initiative puts it into close collaboration with Linux leader Red Hat, as the two are collaborating to ensure that Cisco’s new servers run seamlessly with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). While VMware and Microsoft got a lot of coverage in the Cisco announcement, my conversations with executives behind the scenes reveals a different picture:
* Cisco has been working on this project for more than a year, and it initially figured that it could cover the market with VMware for virtualization, and Windows and RHEL as the operating systems. However, when the company talked with early prospects roughly nine months ago, the vast majority reported that they were using VMware or virtualization in only 5 percent to 10 percent of the workloads Cisco was targeting for its Unified Computing push. They weren’t using Windows, either. Virtually all of them were using Unix or RHEL, with a large swath embracing RHEL.
* RHEL, in fact, is expected to claim 80 percent to 90 percent of Cisco’s Unified Computing customers: those using VMware for virtualization but running RHEL as a guest server operating system, and those not yet comfortable using virtualization in high-end computing workloads, will use RHEL as their base operating system.
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