Replacing – for the moment at least – the speculation that Cisco is interested in acquiring VMware is the rumor that Cisco and VMware are working together on a server code named the California Project.
The rumor has made its way to financial circles where Samuel Wilson of JMP Securities, claiming to have “multiple industry sources,” says he’s heard the thing will ship with a real-time Linux operating system and VMware pre-installed.
He says he heard that the pair will go to market together and VMware “will declare Cisco servers to be the platform of choice for cloud computing, and Cisco’s sales channels will deliver VMware, improving penetration in global markets that have been tough for VMware historically.”
Wilson suggests this is why Cisco bought into VMware last year.
Meanwhile, Internetnews.com has also heard tell of a California Project and identifies it as a Core i7-based blade server that’s heavy on memory and tuned for virtualization.
It thinks it’ll be announced in mid-March.
It also thinks it will connect to Cisco’s Unified Fabric Architecture so the blades talk directly to the storage servers complements of Cisco’s big fast Nexus switch, putting computing and networking in a single box and architecturally uniting the compute and storage platform with the network and virtualization platform – Cisco’s Unified Computing concept.
Seeking Alpha suggests that BMC software will run the thing.
The Wall Street blog figures Cisco wants to be the “primary hardware/software vendor for entire data centers.”
So you see Cisco doesn’t have to buy VMware to tick off IBM, HP et al. It’s found another way to do it.
Categories: 
