HP pits Matrix against Cisco's California

Mark Hurd, in a black leather overcoat, wearing dark shades, standing in a white room that stretches out to infinity. "We need blades. Lots of blades," he mutters. ...And suddenly there are racks and racks of servers, bigger than a Google data centre, hotter than a nuclear simulation, humming away, ready to take on Cisco …

[Vikram]

Matrix vs. California...or just go with Liquid

Unified computing - the complete solution (which seems to elude the two big vendors playing in the space today) is a very disruptive force that will fundamentally change how data centers are designed/operated, as well as who the technology leaders will be moving forward. But, the true destructive benefits of the approach are being held back by the big players. Why?

Well, my opinion is that if you're a vendor worried about what to do with the boat loads of '90's era infrastructure that you've manufactured and sold to customers as recently as last month, you've got a problem. Do you want to explain why you sold something that was something less than the optimal solution available to your customer? Of course not. So, your best course of action is to slow the roll-out of unified computing in order to wring the last bit of revenue out of the old stuff that you can while constructing an on-ramp for your customers with the speed of a road crew.

Data center architects who are interested in building and investing into forward looking infrastructure have learned time and again that during water shed moments such as these, the best solutions come from independent vendors who are unencumbered with the past. Cisco used to be one of those companies...20 years ago. Today, look to independent company's such as Liquid Computing (www.liquidcomputing.com), the only vendor that's actually shipping product and has real customers in production.

A fully featured system can see, manage and control compute+network+storage. Anything less is just an on-ramp.

http://unifiedcomputing.blogspot.com