Re:All smoke and no fire.... (Score 2, Interesting)

Bias up front I work for Cisco.

A couple of comments on your points.

"IBM and Sun make much more Open systems, able to run a wide variety of vmWare, Linux, Solaris, and even AIX on all sorts of hardware (SPARC, POWER, PPC, all sorts of AMD and Intel x64). Their systems are much more flexible and honestly, much more powerful overall in what can be accomplished."

- SUN/IBM have more support on for various platforms than Cisco at present - yes. Cisco is fully supported by VMware, Microsoft & RedHat at this present. We're in the process of validation from additional platforms (Solaris & other flavors of Linux). This is Cisco's debut - give it some time. IBM & SUN didn't reach the level of open support they have today overnight.

"HP has much of the HW flexibility of Sun and IBM, plus the leading management tools."

- A single management instance of UCS can manage 40 Chassis, and up to 320 servers. HP supports 4 Chassis (64 servers) per Management instance. IBM supports only 1 Chassis (14 servers). We've partnered with BladeLogic to make a very powerful managment system. Our management system handles Switching, Storage & Chassis configuration. IBM/HP have separate points of management for each.

"Cisco has no clue as to how to run a systems support organization, which, frankly, is considerably different than running a network hardware support organization. The other big three have decades each in doing this kind of thing."

- True. But we're pretty bright and we learn fast :) That being said there's areas where the "Big 3" fall short, which we can improve on. If nothing else it will raise the bar for competition & features by all vendors. Competition should be welcomed into the market. It only endorses for improvements to technology

"Sun in particular has extremely competitive pricing. HP and IBM are slightly more expensive, but nothing compared to the margins Cisco charges. So, exactly WHAT are people going to get for the 20-40% premium Cisco is charging over IBM?"

- Initial cost is higher than some of the competition. If you make your decisions solely on this fact it would appear that we're inflated. Take into account the consolodation savings, simplified & increased scope of management and ease of server deployment using stateless computing & profiling, the ROI easily outweigh the initial premiums.

"Overall, this looks like a stupid move. I realize that Cisco needs to look for more revenue streams in the face of the commoditizing of most network gear, but this seems like an '80s solution to a 2010 problem."

It probably looked like a stupid move when Cisco entered the Switching market too. Understand Cisco isn't looking to take over the blade market share here. The services-orientated design of this system is target for specific areas of the market - Service Providers, Financial etc. We're taking a new approach to deployment, virtualization & stateless computing.

Cheers,

Chase