Two years ago, we started something that many in the industry said was crazy. We delivered a new system that united compute, network, storage access and virtualization into one cohesive system. There was rampant speculation that Cisco had taken a crazy path to doom and destruction.
Yet, today I’m proud to share that in just two years, sales of the Unified Computing System are outpacing market growth for x86 blades, and Cisco has become the #3 player worldwide in x86 blade server factory revenue. *
Blades are forecast to be the fastest growing segment of the x86 server market** and market data illustrates the impact of UCS innovation: businesses worldwide shifted over 10% of the x86 blade market to UCS, and in the U.S. nearly 20%. Cisco’s rapid growth underscores our leadership in the industry transition to fabric computing and converged infrastructure. On our most recent earnings call, Cisco reported 5,400 UCS customers and an annualized order run rate of $900M for UCS product orders.
As we began our design efforts, we knew we couldn’t set out to design simply another server. We heard from our customers that power, management, and server administration costs were sapping their budgets, leaving few resources for innovation. So we included customers in R&D sessions to help us design from the ground up an evolutionary new system that integrated networking and management: flexible and scalable enough to handle any workload. We aimed to create the ideal, programmable, platform for virtualized and cloud environments, and to help solve many of the very real challenges they faced.
Today’s market share news demonstrates our approach is taking hold. But this is just the beginning: we are committed to evolving UCS and delivering continued technology innovation. Thanks for joining us on this journey – we have leagues more innovation ahead of us. ***
* IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, May 2011
** IDC Q4 CY10 Server Forecaster
*** If you’d like to learn more, below you’ll find additional information on UCS milestones, product awards and customer comments
A few key milestones
As we near the 2nd year anniversary – July 20, 2009- when we first shipped the Cisco Unified Computing System, it seems like the perfect time to look back on what we’ve accomplished so far.
- July 2009: Cisco begins shipping the UCS B-Series blade server
- October 2009: Cisco delivers to market the UCS patented Memory Extension Blade
- Nov. 2009: Cisco ships the UCS C-Series rack mount server
- December 2009: Cisco delivers the Virtual Interface Card for adapter consolidation and virtualization optimization; enables each virtualized adapter to define up to 128 Ethernet or Fibre Channel connections.
- April 2010: Cisco delivers next generation servers based on Intel Xeon processor 5600 series and Intel Xeon processor 7500 series; adds 4-socket servers to the UCS portfolio
- April 2011: Cisco now offers 9 systems in UCS portfolio; wins nine new industry benchmark world records
- May 2011: Cisco captures #3 spot in worldwide x86 blade server market **
From the awards, product reviews, and customer comments below, I think it’s clear why UCS is succeeding in the market.
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