CISCO shows intrest in cloudcomputing

Padmasree Warrior, Cisco’s chief technology officer, gave the standard speech we hear nowadays any time an IT executive opens their mouth. They talk about cloud computing and how this “changes everything,” or sometimes, they even say that cloud computing fulfills decades of promises for the kind of heterogeneous, distributed, n-tier, flexible computing that people have been dreaming about since the telephone company was the boogie man – not Microsoft or Google.

Anyway, Cisco is interested in cloud computing, and obviously, its Unified Fabric for networks and storage, its blade and rack servers, and its virtualized servers and networks will play a part – and perhaps a big part – in cloud computing. We all get that.

The important newsflash today is that Cisco does not plan to throw its hat in the ring and build its own compute or storage clouds and compete against the likes of Amazon, IBM, and Sun Microsystems Oracle, who are building their own clouds just like every telecom company, service provider, and Internet hosting firm seems to be doing or will soon do. The IT world is not just going to be cloudy like Earth. It is going to be dense with clouds like Venus, or at the very least, swirling with them like Jupiter.

Warrior explained that Cisco sees cloud computing as having four tiers. The lower tier is an IT foundation, including servers, storage, and networking, and that the whole point of UCS was to be a player for infrastructure. In this area, Cisco plans to compete with IBM and Hewlett-Packard as well as partner with EMC, VMware, Microsoft, and others.

The next tier up is what Warrior referred to as infrastructure as a service, which means selling cloud computing capacity like Amazon does with its EC2 compute utility and S3 and EBS storage utilities. Warrior showed a slide that pegged Amazon, AT&T, BT, HP, IBM, Sun Microsystems Oracle, Savvis, Telstra, and Terremark as the key suppliers so far. And Cisco will not be one of them, even though it must be tempting to build a cloud at cost and sell capacity on it.

We do not have plans to become an IT as a service provider,” Warrior stated emphatically. Later in her presentation, during a question and answer session, Warrior explained that selling raw capacity on a compute cloud “is counter to our business model” but was quick to add that Cisco absolutely would be building its own internal clouds (and presumably based on California blades and unified fabrics) to run applications that it provides as a service to customers.

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