The networking giant is widely expected to announce an entry into the blade server market, code-named "California," at the Monday event, though the company's brief press invitation referred only to a concept Cisco calls "Unified Computing." In a recent , Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior described Unified Computing as a move toward unifying computing and storage platforms with networks and virtualization platforms. She also acknowledged Cisco will compete with some of its partners.

What Cisco wants to do, according to industry analysts, is to make virtualization easier -- and gain a lot more control over virtualization itself. That goal doesn't necessarily require the company to make its own servers, but some signals point in that direction.

Unified Computing is intended to give IT administrators a way to manage all the components of a virtualized data center from one place, according to Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala. Virtualization lets enterprises run applications in virtual machines that can be moved from one physical server to another. But when those changes are made, the network topology of the data center can be disrupted. When a virtual machine moves to a server with a different IP (Internet Protocol) address, on a different virtual LAN, it may not perform as well or may even become unavailable, Kerravala said.

So today, network engineers have to go in after each change and make adjustments, such as changing access control lists and reconfiguring the network.

"For the first time in history, network managers have had to become slaves to the computing guys," Kerravala said.