Cisco representatives Glenn Keels, director of product marketing, and Paul Durzan, director of product management for UCS, would not say how much more memory would be possible, but said that the new UCS B-series blade servers, based on Intel's Nehalem processor, would use technology patented by Cisco that extends the memory to support applications with large data sets and allow significantly more virtual machines per server.

The Cisco UCS would also allow management of a data center with virtual machines as a single system, whether it has one or 320 servers, said the Cisco officials.

They said that BMC had set up a single management console that would control movement of service profile of a virtual machine, while VMware would provide the actual movement of the virtual machines, which could number in the thousands over server infrastructure including 320 servers.

Analyst Jason Ader, of William Blair & Co., said he was not convinced that BMC's management in the UCS would be unique to Cisco. "I am not sure there is anything truly unique here [with UCS] that a customer couldn't build by taking pieces of various vendors and putting them together," he said in an interview.

BMC's Beauchamp said that company was the preferred management vendor for the Cisco UCS. He said BMC was allowed by Cisco to take its management software for UCS and apply it to other servers from other vendors.