SAN JOSE – Cisco Systems has announced the Unified Computing System, which the networking vendor sees as the future of the datacenter and how it will evolve through virtualization and cloud computing.

According to Cisco, the Unified Computing System (UCS), which it has worked on with several industry partners (including VMware), will change business models while also pushing towards that computing use model of access any time and anywhere, CNET News.Com reported.

“Today’s announcement, unified computing, is giving our customers the chance to unleash the true power of virtualization — to leverage so much that they’ve already done,” said Rob Lloyd, executive vice president-designate of worldwide operations at Cisco Systems, during an industry roundtable with media and analysts.

Cisco UCS was designed to be a next-generation datacenter platform that unites compute, network, storage access and virtualization into a cohesive system. Combined with VMware’s virtualization platform, UCS is designed to provide an efficient, reliable, scalable and flexible environment for delivery of IT as a service.

“What we’re really talking about here is catching the next market evolution,” said John Chambers, chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems.

Cisco and VMware now have a strategic OEM agreement that includes product engineering and integrates sales and support for unified computing and datacenter virtualization.

According to Chambers, Cisco sees a market transition and inflection point that will change the way business is done. Technology architectures will be combined with business architectures — and that will mean something big to customers, he said.

The opportunity that Cisco is going after is the cracks between the IT silos, Lloyd explained. UCS won’t be taken to the traditional network buying center, nor the server buying center, but instead it will be an executive engagement for the company and its channel partners, he said.

Together with industry partners, Cisco announced several different solutions to support the UCS strategy. These include solutions with Accenture, as well as agreements with and technology support for BMC Software, EMC, Red Hat, Intel, Microsoft, VMware and others.

The technology has been built so that each UCS will be able to support thousands of virtual machines. The systems support consolidated I/O via 10Gb lossless Ethernet and fibre channel over Ethernet. They contain a built-in VN-link, which is a technology being proposed to the IEEE, as well as support for the VMware vCentre suite of management products for managing virtual network policies and resources.

Additionally, Cisco virtualization consulting services will be available to help customers create and deploy server, network and storage virtualization solutions across their datacenters. According to Cisco, customers will be able to reduce costs by provisioning new applications quickly and safely while also keeping up a high level of application performance.

“Today we’re really talking about a world-class ecosystem in terms of how we go to market,” Chambers said.

According to Mario Mazzola, senior vice president of server access and virtualization business unit at Cisco Systems, it’s important to focus on flexibility and agility to allow application migration to this new system. Application evolution will be very important going forward, he said.

Virtualization has been a hot topic for some time now, and vendors generally see a growing opportunity in the space. Cisco sees an opportunity to provide control, scale and improved performance between what are now silos in the IT datacenter infrastructure, Mazzola said.

“We have already developed a specialization for our channel, and we have developed 250 channel partners that have invested deeply in specialization in datacenter,” Lloyd said.

For channel partners, the value proposition with UCS is in delivering solutions and services that enable them to help customers cross the IT silos that have existed in the datacenter, he said.

“We’re really talking about an approach that protects our customers’ investments that has a world-class ecosystem,” Chambers said.

While Cisco executives said they think the company is moving in the right direction with UCS, one of the vendor’s major competitors had a different take on the announcement.

“This is a first generation product that targets a segment of the market that Cisco probably doesn’t know much about. It creates new vertical silos and bucks the trend of ‘scale out’ architecture in cloud computing datacenters,” said David Yen, executive vice president and general manager of the datacenter business group at Juniper Networks.

According to Mazzolo, Cisco’s approach is a holistic one that provides agility and the ability to scale upwards.

Although based on Intel blade server architecture and using Cisco networking technology, Lloyd said the UCS represents a shift.

“You can’t think of this as a blade or a network. It actually is a system,” Lloyd said.

This column was written by Chris Talbot of ConnectIT, an IntegratedMarCompany

a>>