Cisco's biggest challenge in selling its sweeping new Unified Computing System is to convince the data center managers who buy blade servers to put all their eggs in a single basket - one woven by a router vendor instead of the incumbent server suppliers. "Server buyers don't have a relationship with Cisco," says James Staten of Forrester Research. "It will be tough to convince them of the need for another player in this market." Cisco last week finally took the wraps off of its long-anticipated UCS platform, which incorporates internally developed blade servers and is designed to tightly integrate data center computing, storage, networking and virtualization capabilities.The blade server component has been the focus of much industry speculation over the past year, and what it might mean to Cisco's relationships with longtime partners and blade server makers HP and IBM.
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