Cisco's Project California

Cisco planning significant data center assault - Network World

This is a good article hinting at the future of where Cisco is taking their push into the server market. I had the opportunity this week to participate in a briefing on Project California. I'm under NDA and can't comment on specific details until the product is released but it will be interesting to see where this goes. As anyone who has worked with Cisco for any length of time knows, they focus on technology unification. If they can do for network and server unification what they did with network and telephony unification, it significantly changes the future landscape of computing. We're already seeing that collapse with their drive towards the unified fabric technologies. Should be a fun 2009.

There is also some mention in this article about HP and the switching market. While I think there are definitely niche groups that lean towards using non-Cisco products, I think Cisco has the market fairly locked down in switching. It was interesting to see Juniper annouce that they are moving into the LAN switching market this year and I think Juniper probably has a much better chance at pushing their market share upwards than HP. Networking pros like Juniper and the company is very forward thinking. HP is still viewed as a legacy Goliath and while they have made some impressive releases (especially in the 10G+ market), they have many more reputation problems to overcome....similar to IBM.