Cisco, HP, and Sun in the News

Cisco Systems Inc.  posted strong third quarter financial results and offered a positive outlook.  . In other news, Hewlett Packard Co. (HP) introduced its Extreme storage solution while Sun Microsystems Inc. announced the first official release of OpenSolaris.

Focal Points:

• Cisco reported total revenues for the third quarter increased 10.4 percent year-over-year to $9.8 billion. Net income for the quarter on a GAAP basis was $1.8 billion or $0.29 per diluted share. According to officials the company continues to show a continued balance of revenues and growth across twenty major product families, four key customer segments and five geographies. Routing revenues were up 14 percent year-over-year; advanced technologies increased 17 percent; and services grew 15 percent. Total gross margin by geography ranged from 64 percent for Emerging Markets to 70 percent in Japan. Officials also expect its collaboration growth drivers to kick in as phase II of the Internet is enabled by networked Web 2.0 technologies.
• HP revealed its StorageWorks 9100 Extreme system a storage system for Web companies and other organizations that need multi-petabytes of data storage. The company claims the system is designed for managing large amounts of online data for things such as subscriber information, video content, video surveillance systems, research organizations, and medical institutions that are heavy users of medical imaging. HP states the system is priced at a relatively affordable rate of about $2 per gigabyte, while comparable competitive systems start at about $5 a gigabyte. A fully loaded Extreme system with a petabyte of storage costs $1.6 million while a baseline system with 246 terabytes will cost $500,000. The Extreme appliance includes a chassis capable of holding from four to 16 server blades, and up to 10 "storage blocks." Each block is 7U and slides in as one unit, which holds up to 82 TB of data and contains an array of SATA drives connected by SAS controllers. A minimum system configuration is four blades and three blocks. The new product also includes a cluster file system based on technology from former storage virtualization software maker PolyServe, which HP acquired in March 2007.
• Sun announced the first official release of OpenSolaris at its CommunityOne conference in San Francisco last week. Sun's open-source version of the Solaris Operating System comes with two subscription support offerings from Sun Services: OpenSolaris Essentials Subscription Support and OpenSolaris Production Subscription Support. The fees for annual commercial support range from $320 to $2,000 per system. OpenSolaris OS ships with a LiveCD installation and the new network-based OpenSolaris Image Packaging System (IPS), making it easy to download, install and integrate with third-party applications by providing easy-to-use system management and better control of applications and dependencies. It features Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), Solaris Containers, and the Zettabyte File System (ZFS) as its default file system.

Experton Group believes the business models for hardware vendors are quickly shifting and companies such as Cisco, HP, and Sun will proselytize customers to join them in the new world of cloud computing, open source, and Web 2.0. Competitors such as EMC Corp. and IBM Corp. will be offering their conflicting visions as well. IT executives will have the challenge of funding and transforming their current architectures (if they exist) and legacy systems to what will become standard platform technologies within five years. IT executives should have their architectural blueprints in place and work with their preferred providers to ensure corporate architectural plans and timelines map with those of their strategic suppliers.