Twitter, Facebook, Google+… it’s all over the (social) news
Wednesday September 11 it was all over the news: all my popular news resources mentioned in one way or the other that Cisco is now into storage. The “Software Defined Data Center” buzz word is “buzzing” since the beginning of 2013, at least I didn’t hear much of it before that.
Many companies (including my employer Open Line Consultancy with Storage As A Service and Backup As A Service) already do business this way for years, it’s just that all of a sudden it has a popular name that everybody’s using since this year. But thinking about clouds with automated processes to fine tune and schedule every wish for storage, cpu or memory has really become popular. And with Cisco now acquiring Whiptail, this vendor will now be able to participate in this rising market space.
Cisco acquires Whiptail
So Cisco aquires Whiptail for $415 M (allthingsd.com). Why would they do that? Cisco’s good at all networking activities and since a few years UCS servers as well, but ok, storage? My opinion is that they just want to be able to supply the whole SDDC package. And I also think it’s more targeted at the smaller solutions, compared to the whole deal with EMC where the customer size is probably a bit larger; at least in number of Terabytes of storage, that is.
Cisco’s involvement with EMC and VMware (VSPEX and VCE) isn’t compromised (a lot) though, at least so EMC says. In my honest opinion (IMHO) the Whiptail solution will be used to provide local storage in blade enclosure technology. for the more scalable storage solutions, there’s still EMC to come to the rescue!
A shift in the market
Chad Sakac (EMC) certainly has his opinion ready. Read his article on virtualgeek.typepad.com to see how he thinks about it. It will certainly take some time for Cisco to sell this new product and it will most certainly mean a decrease in the share that EMC’s now taking in this market, but then again, I think that it will also attract the smaller customers that previously weren’t going to buy a Cisco centered solution, and now they just might decide to go for it.
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