If you're big enough, Cisco will cook you a private software SKU

Vulture South last week spotted an oddity in this Cisco end of sale announcement for “Cisco Select UCS Server Accessories”. Way down the page are a couple of products bearing the name “Telstra” - that's Telstra as in Australia's dominant telco. The two products are called “Telstra Custom - 10 x (MapR-Conf-Hadoop, DB-AddOn, …

[Anonymous Coward]

There's more that can be drawn from this:

1) MapR's market presence is so small that what would otherwise be a bog standard reference architecture ("CVD" in the local lingo) ends up being a bespoke SKU

2) It's no longer needed.

[Griffo]

Plus a few years ago Telstra spent a small fortune building DC's stacked with Cisco UCS gear to try to compete with AWS and Azure etc. They weren't particularly successful.

[A Non e-mouse]

Cisco UCS seems an expensive way to compete with AWS & Azure.

[Sam Adams the Dog]

Wait a second....

Were they trying to run a cloud across Telco-owned routers at customer sites?

Sounds a bit like the days of Grid Computing, when an emergent concept (so-called because it never actually emerged ;-) ) was for cable companies to rent out (to third parties) computational resources on large numbers of set-top boxes that the cable companies owned. The boxes usually had MIPS chips, and they were nodes in a fast network connection, so what else did you need? Or so the argument went....

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had custom Cisco SKUs built for me in a past life. I suppose I should feel special as well. I wanted to buy UCS Servers with 30 day warranties. I was getting them without and drives or RAID controllers or anything just PXE into a hypervisor and off to the races. We had so few failures (mostly DIMMs) in our scale it made no sense to carry a fist full of spare DIMMs and pocket the savings and if there was something more serious than DIMMs its gets sent off to be troubleshot and re-purposed for lab use after being repaired. (Didn't happen at all often) So Cisco built us a SKU with 30 day warranties. It was very substantial savings. We carried 4 hour support on FI's and 30 days on everything else. I guess when you buy UCS 160 servers (a full UCS domain) at a time you do get some flexibility.

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a large(ish) organisation (but nowhere near as big as Telstra) and we've had custom deals for hardware & software from Cisco too.

Compared to some of the other teir 1 vendors, Cisco seem more willing to strike a deal.

[Warm Braw]

There was a time when just about every large cisco customer seemed to have an "own-label" variant of IOS - and it was a nightmare to support. It's amazing how sales and marketing teams could do deals to get around the corporate pricelist and make themselves a nice commission without having to pass any of that on to the engineering teams to help deal with the significant additional cost...

[Anonymous Coward]

On the downside...

... you still end up with Cisco UCS servers.