Posted by: Eric Siegel
Hey, it looks as if my predictions may be correct! Today the papers are full of articles about how Cisco is "becoming a computer company." (See, for example, The New York Times and The San Francisco Chronicle)
I've blogged before about this before, ("Cisco the Computer Company" and "Cisco the Computer Company, Act II"), but I've always thought they were going to restrict themselves to becoming the intelligent, coordinating backplane for other vendors' computer systems. As I said, they would be "re-creating the Tandem Computers (HP) NonStop backplane in a heterogeneous server environment."
The articles indicate that Cisco may be aiming to take over the whole hairy, smoking boule of silicon 'n software. I suppose that's what happens when you have lots of hungry salesreps to feed.
But I'm not so sure that's what they'd want to do.
Yes, Cisco has a huge opportunity to pull together the world of virtual systems, ensuring that corresponding processes are located close to each other to decrease latency, that messages among processes are easily traceable and measurable, that even non-Cisco equipment can be integrated into an heterogeneous system bound together by communications paths and inter-process messages, that systems can be managed as a whole.
But Cisco has never shown major leadership in systems management; would they be able to rise to the occasion?
And Cisco's own development of its own principal operating system, IOS, has been, uh, difficult. Yes, they've made some real advances in the past few years, but they would be competing against companies who have been focused on OS development for customers who are programmers, not OS development as a partially-hidden piece of an infrastructure, where software tangles can be somewhat hidden.
So I'm going to stick to my original idea: that Cisco is really aiming at becoming the intelligent, coordinating backplane, where programmers could drop an inter-process message into that backplane (for example, with a SOAP header giving the name of the destination process) and be sure that it would be delivered to that process exactly once.
===== 2 February 2009 UPDATE =====
OK, I see that the press is full of news about how Cisco is going to go into the development of virtual servers, so maybe I should look at this again. Cisco's CTO, Padmasree Warrior, has just posted a video about this as a follow up to her her blog entry on 19 Jan 09.
She says that Cisco sees an opportunity in "breaking down the silos between compute, storage, virtualization and network platforms" to create an integrated system, with the network as the platform. She wants to break down the "islands of virtulization."
Padmasree says that "phase two, or unified fabric, is the phase which optimizes and extends data center technologies through consolidation of virtualization across the network, storage, and server application. Phase three, or unified computing, virtualizes the entire data center through a pre-integrated architecture..."
How would this be done technically? Well, whenever a new process is created in a VM, it could be packaged inside a software shell that would automatically provide a higher-level set of session-level protocol headers giving the guaranteed identity of the sender, the precise time the message is sent, and a unique transaction and message ID. As I said, we're back to the Tandem Computers NonStop backplane, with Cisco as the unifying part of the ecosystem. As Padmasree says, "the network is the platform."
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