Australian Cisco chief technology officer Kevin Bloch has denied that the networking giant is chasing HP and IBM's server business with its Unified Computing Platform.
"Cisco is not getting into the server market to take on the two biggest competitors," said Bloch in a keynote presentation at Westcon's Imagine event in Sydney.
Bloch said Cisco's decision to create a unified approach to networking, compute and storage was a response to reducing power consumption in the data centre.
While the cost of storage and servers was decreasing, the cost of power and cooling was increasing in line with the expasnion of data centres.
Bloch estimated that 10 percent of the cost of operating a data centre was spent on power.
"In a couple of years that might be 50 percent," he said.
Combining compute, networking, storage and virtualisation into one system allowed cost-effective "virtualisation at scale".
Energy management was becoming central to the jobs of IT professionals, said Bloch.
"Will IT managers become energy managers? Will IT consultants become energy consultants?" asked Bloch.
UCS was available in Australia but only four resellers were currently selling it.
Bloch said Cisco had given the hardware a "throttled release" to ensure resellers had time to certify their staff in installing and supporting the range.
"We could be shipping bucketloads but we needed to get the basics right first," said Bloch.
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