(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Cisco Systems (www.cisco.com) may soon join competitors IBM, SGI, and Sun in the lucrative market of containerized data centers, according to a report by Information Week.
Though the company has been selling components of containerized data centers to the military through systems integrators for quite some time, last year it began offering servers and network equipment.
In doing so, the company has positioned itself to potentially enter the containerized data center business.
Bruce Klein, Cisco’s US public sector senior VP, says the company is “looking at a model of building a Cisco container — with a Cisco part number — that will contain the unified computing platform”.
Currently, Cisco equipment is already featured inside containerized data centers from other vendors, as well as inside NASA’s Nebula data center container, which contains Unified Computing System blade servers.
On its website, Cisco recently posted a section about the “Cisco Containerized Data Center”, which it claims cuts capital costs by 50 percent and operating costs by 30 percent.
Kevin Orr, director of defense operations for Cisco’s US public sector business, says the company has improved its delivery time in putting together containerized data centers from 18 months to as quick as two weeks from order to delivery.
Last month Cisco ended its long-time channel partnership with HP.
