Cisco claims 400 customers, described as enterprises and service providers, for the year-old Unified Computing Systems that so offended long-time partners like HP and IBM. (HP’s ticked enough to have dumped Tandberg video conferencing for Polycom when Cisco closed its acquisition of Tandberg a couple of weeks ago not to mention buying 3Com.)
How many boxes each of the 400 (which reminds one of Mrs. Astor’s 400 though Thermopylae’s 300 may fit better) bought is unspoken, but apparently it’s more than one each.
The widgets started shipping eight months ago and with the latest rev of Intel’s Nehalem Xeon processor Cisco upgraded the things, calling them second generation and roughly 30%-50% more energy efficient. It’s also got new networking chips of its own for the update.
It’s using Intel’s Xeon four- and six-core 5600 chip in two-socket servers that have been shipping with its own proprietary memory-expanding ASICs since late March and will be using the eight-core Xeon 7500 Nehalem-EX chip in four-socket servers set to leave the dock in the next few weeks. The latter, a standard 6U 128-core 256GB B440-M1 blade and a 4U 32-core 512Gb C460-M1 rack, will be going after HP, IBM and Sun RISC accounts and are supposed to make Cisco a player.
Cisco said at the end of its second quarter that UCS was still in pilots and the early stage of customer acceptance and that it probably wouldn’t have anything substantive to say about it until maybe November or December. It’s expecting the second generation to accelerate sales.
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