Cisco Plans $184M Dallas Data Center

Cisco Systems (CSCO) plans to build invest at least $184 million in a major data center in Allen, Texas, a northern suburb of Dallas. The new facility is planned for a 34-acre site near North Central Expressway. Cisco’s plans call for a 140,000 square foot data center, which could eventually be expanded to 350,000 square feet. Construction is slated to begin early next year and take 18 to 24 months to complete.

The site in Allen is adjacent to two 138 kV (138,000 volt) transmission lines and an existing substation. The city’s marketing for the site includes plans for two 23 megawatt power feeds.

Local officials in Allen were jubilant. “It’s huge for us,” Jennifer Grimm. Director of Business Development with the Allen Economic Development Corp., told the Dallas News, which reported details of the project last night. “We’ve been working for several years to market sites up there for data centers.” The city will provide property tax abatements and road improvements.

The scope of the project is significant for Cisco. The company operates 52 data centers, including 14 production facilities and 38 data centers used for product development of the company’s networking and data center products. But none of these facilities are huge, as Cisco has a total data center footprint of 215,000 square feet. Many of the company’s data centers are smaller facilities built by companies that Cisco later acquired.

The Zettabyte Era Approaches

In 2013 Internet traffic will be four times larger than it is today, with the equivalent of 10 billion DVDs crossing the Internet each month. That’s the view of Cisco Systems (CSCO) in a new research paper filled with great big numbers about Internet traffic growth.

The bottom line: brace for an explosion of video traffic. The Cisco Visual Networking Index projects that video will account for 91 percent of all consumer Internet traffic by 2013. Internet video will be 60 percent of all traffic, with TV, video on demand and P2P video sharing accounting for the remainder.

Some other data points of note:

• Annual global IP traffic in 2013 will reach 667 exabytes, or two-thirds of a zettabyte.
• Mobile data traffic will grow 131 percent a year to about 2 exabytes a month in 2013.
• By 2013, video will comprise 64 percent of all mobile traffic.
• Peer-to-peer traffic will continue to grow, but become a smaller component of Internet traffic in percentage terms.
• In 2013, the volume of Internet video will be 700 times the capacity of the U.S. Internet backbone in 2000.

In short, Cisco sees huge traffic growth ahead that will test current infrastructure capacity. Say, anyone know where we can get some routers and switches?

Cisco Unveils Rackmount Servers for UCS

After shaking up the market for blade servers, Cisco Systems (CSCO) is launching a line of rackmount servers to extend its Unified Computing System, the company said today. The Cisco “C Series” will offer both 1U and 2U servers with extended memory capabilities built atop the Intel Xeon 55000 processor. The new products offers an entry point to the lower adapter and cable footprint enabled by the Unified Computing System (UCS) for companies who’ve built their data centers using rackmount servers instead of blades.

The announcement proted questions about whether Cisco, with its reputation for premium pricing, will be a meaningful player in the price-sensitive “volume” server market. But Cisco says its ambitions are more targeted than a full-scale “all your racks are belong to us” assault on the commodity server market. Cisco executives said it sees its rackmount line as offer a choice of form factors to customers interested in the broader UCS system.

“This is not ‘Cisco entering the rackmount space’,” said John Growdon, Director of Worldwide Channels for Cisco. “I think that diminishes what we are doing here. We are in the unified compute space, and this is a different form factor for us.”

Cisco Added to Dow 30

Cisco Systems (CSCO) has been added to the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the 30-stock index that has become the best-known metric for the U.S. stock markets. Cisco will replace General Motors, which was removed from the index this morning after filing for bankruptcy protection. Travelers Insurance was also added, replacing Citigroup. The Dow 30 is managed by the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal.   

Shares of Cisco were up nearly 5 percent in early trading. Companies that are added to major indices typically see a bump in their share price due to their increased visibility and  mandatory buying from index funds that mirror key indicators.

Cisco Unifying its In-House Data Centers

A visual example of the reduction in cabling Cisco says can be realized with its Unified Computing System.

Cisco Systems (CSCO) will shift all of its in-house data centers to the company’s new Unified Computing System in the next two years, the company said this week. The migration will take place as part of a rolling hardware refresh that will see all of Cisco’s data centers gradually converted to the company’s new infrastructure platform.

Cisco operates 52 data centers, including 14 production facilities and 38 data centers used for product development of the company’s networking and data center products. Cisco has a total data center footprint of 215,000 square feet, which uses about 20 megawatts of power.

The Unified Computing System brings together hardware - including the new B-Series blade server and network adapters - that seamlessly connect with storage systems over a high-speed unified network fabric powered by Cisco’s new Nexus family of switches, enabling virtualized assets to move seamlessly across the data center and the Internet.

Accenture Touts Cisco UCS as ERP Platform

Having made a splash with the introduction of its Unifed Computing System(UCS), Cisco Systems used the recent Blade Systems Insight conference as an opportunity to showcase some of the partners supporting its drive into the data center. These included BMC Software, which is powering Cisco’s management software, and the global consulting firm Accenture. There’s been quite a bit written about BMC’s importancein Cisco’s data center strategy, including speculation about an acquisition.

Accenture will be a key partner for Cisco in implementing the UCS system for its large enterprise clients. The two companies have formed the Accenture & Cisco Business Group, a “virtual organization” to provide a single point of contact to design and build solutions around Cisco’s latest technology.

One area where Accenture sees great potential for UCS is enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, where the new platform may allow some to lower their costs. “We’re going to be able to move large Oracle and SAP installations onto this system,” said Lin Chase, Director of New Market Development for the Accenture & Cisco Business Group, who said Accenture has a “multi-billion dollar practice” specializing in data center optimization and consolidations.

Cisco: IBM-Brocade Deal is Targeting HP

Yesterday we noted IBM’s decision to resell Brocade’s Foundry networking gear, adding that “the move is widely seen as a response to the decision by IBM partner Cisco Systems to enter the blade server market.” Not so, according to Cisco’s Bill Marozas, who says industry pundits have jumped to an erroneous conclusion.

“In reality, it’s an anti-HP strategy,” Marozas writes on Cisco’s Data Center Networks blog. “IBM needed to counter HP’s Data Center strategy and broader DC portfolio offering and Brocade/Foundry gave them what they needed: An OEM deal through which IBM can now resell its own branded ethernet gear vs. ProCurve in accounts.  The Cisco-IBM SAN (MDS 9000 Family of products) relationship remains strong.” Information Week agrees that HP is the target, but plenty of othersthink Cisco is in Big Blue’s crosshairs.

Cisco Unveils Blade Server Memory, Pricing

Cisco Systems continued its gradual rollout of its Unified Computing System today, outlining memory enhancements in its new blade server and centralized management. Cisco also discussed pricing, emphasizing that the substantial investment required for its Nexus switches will enable savings that ripple throughout the next-generation data center.

But even as Cisco was unveiling its new technology and pricing, the vendor lanscape continued to shift around it, as reports emerged that IBM plans to forge a deeper relationship with Cisco rival Brocade Systems (BRCD). Big Blue said it would begin selling switches and routers from Foundry Networks, which Brocade acquired last year. 

Cisco’s news today included some details of memory enhancements for Cisco blade servers using Intel’s Xeon 5500 (Nehalem) processor, which hadn’t been announced when Cisco launched its UCS initiative on  March 16.

Cisco said it has boosted the memory capacity of the Xeon 5500, using a custom ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) to provide the processor with a four-fold increase in the number of memory modules it can access. This expands a UCS Xeon 5500 system from 144GB to 384GB, and also gives users the option of using more affrodable memory configurations.