Cisco’s Dylan Morison, data centre lead for Australia and New Zealand, compares the impact of integrated servers or “fabric” computing to the disruption caused by IP telephony.
The telecommunications market had many private- branched exchanges but technology convergence from IP telephony brought greater flexibilty, efficiency and new applications.
“What we learned was that you couldn’t get legacy systems and just plug a blade in and say we had IP telephony. You didn’t have the same flexibility, scale and other things,” Morison says.
“Servers are the same. You have legacy systems that are trying to put a software stack on top of the hardware and trying to give you the same flexibility.”
The step up from UCS, which combines networking and processing, is the vBlock that has EMC storage. As with other integrated server vendors, the focus is on the ease and speed of deployment for application systems or cloud environments.
Morison says vBlocks are sold to those looking for fast returns. NetApp’s version is the FlexPod but both cut complexity through integration.
“The vBlock only has one plug out of the back,” he says. “You literally power it up and off you go. From that point of view you’re delivering a solution you’ll tend to get better margin with a customer than deploying a blade or a switch or a router, where you’ll be commoditised down to a very low margin.”
He says the key to the integrated server sale is making sure the customer understands the benefits of architecture; it is flexible and efficient and that cuts costs in the long run.
Customers are not managing discrete silos; they can see all resources and networking is optimised for server workloads and tasks.
He says the customer doesn’t “care what piece of tin goes in there. They care about how easy it is to manage and support and how scalable it is”.
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