Cisco Extends Network Fabric Relationship with HP

A lot of solution providers in the channel are pretty sick and tired of all the internecine warfare between IT vendors, especially when you consider how many of those same vendors are dependent on revenues that involve solutions from two or more vendors that usually spend more time bashing each other than actually trying to improve the customer experience.

So it’s with a certain amount of a relief this week that the channel was greeted with some significant news in the way of cooperation between two major vendors. Cisco and Hewlett-Packard have announced that the two companies are extending existing cooperative engineering agreements to add support for Cisco Nexus Fabric Extenders inside HP’s BladeSystem Servers.

Given all the trash talking that goes on between HP and Cisco in the networking space and the fact that Cisco views HP as the primary competitor in its drive to gain server share with its Unified Computing System (UCS), a lot of solution providers might be pleasantly surprised to discover that once all the noise subsides more financially-motivated minds seem to prevail.

According to Pramod Srivatsa, a Cisco Nexus product line manager, as the evolution of enterprise networking continues to move towards the building of network fabrics, customers are anxious to see the Cisco networking ecosystem continue to expand. That’s critically important, adds Srivatsa, at a time when many customers are rapidly moving to 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks both as a way to consolidate network switches and make the network bandwidth available that is really required to support any large-scale deployment of virtual machines.

To a certain extend this latest agreement between Cisco and HP represents how business as usual should be conducted from the perspective of the majority of solution providers in the channel that generally don’t want to be forced into selling only one vendor’s products to the exclusion of all others. That may be good business for the vendor, but for the solution provider it tends to narrow the base of customers they can really pursue, which when you think about it is almost never a good thing.