HP, Cisco jab over virtualization bragging rights

17.03.2009
Cisco's for data centers quickly sparked a bragging battle about which vendor can perform virtualization better.

The best-known vendors of blade servers, HP and IBM, are expected to be the most directly affected by Cisco's move.

However, Cisco's partners in the UCS venture, including BMC Software Inc., described unique characteristics in the new products, which are expected to hit the market in the second quarter.

"The Cisco hardware platform does things not done by others and [BMC] exploits the functionality of their hardware" to provide management, BMC's CEO, Bob Beauchamp, told Computerworld after the announcement.

Beauchamp said BMC had "every possible kind of relationship" with IBM and HP as "fierce competitors and also partners." As such, he predicted that the BMC relationship with HP and IBM would "kind of remain the same" despite the obvious Cisco attack on their blade servers. "In general, this [Cisco news] is certainly more competitive," Beauchamp said.

But officials at HP reacted quickly to the Cisco announcement, noting they had more than 12 years of experience in shipping servers and virtualization technology for use in data centers.