back to article 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, …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    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.

    1. 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.

      1. A Non e-mouse Silver badge

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

  2. 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....

  3. Anonymous Coward
    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.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      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.

      1. 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...

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    On the downside...

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

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