"To be dead honest, the Cisco news is a bit of a compliment for us, I believe," said Matt Zanner, worldwide director of data center solutions for HP Procurve, the networking division of HP. HP laid out a new open networking concept with a new family of switches in January, which provides "strong validation that we are headed in the right direction as well," Zanner said.

For HP, blade servers had been a more recognized product set at HP than data center switching, some analysts said. So while Cisco is moving from its traditional networking base to include servers with UCS, HP was strengthening its data center switching portfolio, analysts noted.

IDC said in February that HP had 36% of the overall server market and 58% of the x86 server revenues of the blade server market. An HP spokesman said, that "makes HP the No. 1 competitor for any entry into this market."

An IBM spokesman dodged the potential controversy over competition for the blade server market with Cisco, calling it a "common dynamic in our industry ... We'll compete with them for blades and partner with them to build out network infrastructure."

But Cisco said it would be doing things unique to virtualization, including providing greater memory capability than has previously been available.