Cisco’s Data Center Ambitions Stir the Pot

In an industry ripe with vendor rivalries, the latest battleground is notable for its many-against-one flavor. Alliances have been forming in what appears to be a mission with a singular goal: Anyone but Cisco.

Clearly, Cisco’s breaking beyond its networking roots in a quest for dominance in the data center space has rattled more than a few of the major server and infrastructure players from HP to Dell to IBM. The rhetoric alone from some of the latter company’s executives only proves that out. Many are looking at holes in their portfolios to fill and strategic alliances to form.

Dell is just the latest to strengthen ties to another vendor in a way that shores up its offerings against Cisco’s Unified Compute System initiative. The channel-come-lately vendor on Wednesday expanded its existing OEM relationship with Brocade to develop a Dell-branded virtualization solution that will help optimize and manage the data center. The alliance also involved integrated tool sets for managing the delivery of applications as services across the data center infrastructure.

Dell also is not the first vendor to look to Brocade technology to round out its data center capabilities. Earlier this month, storage player NetApp tightened its ties to Brocade, adding three new Brocade products – a switch, blade and converged network adapters – to what it resells on an OEM basis. Likewise, IBM upped its partnership with Brocade and NetApp, and inked an OEM deal with Juniper that adds a networking infrastructure component to Big Blue’s portfolio. IBM shed most of its networking business some years ago, but as data center convergence takes hold might be realizing it needs to play here more broadly. That message was clear when Cisco broke into IBM domain of blade and rackmount servers this year.

To be sure there’s competitive jockeying among all the major players with no formal gang forming against Cisco. But the shoring up of data center portfolios and the strengthening of strategic alliances went into high gear about the time the networking giant went public with plans to be more than just switches and routers.

The question I have is this: As the Tier 1s duke it out, are there Tier 2s and below vendors that might benefit as the alternative or best of breed, while also giving solution providers a more defined, simpler place to focus?