Arik Hesseldahl

Recent Posts by Arik Hesseldahl

Surprise! Cisco’s Blade Servers Are Number Three in the Market.

Market research firm IDC is just out with its latest estimate of the x86 sever market, and the big surprise is not who’s leading it, because overall it’s still the usual suspects, Hewlett-Packard and IBM.

The surprise, however, is that Cisco Systems–yes, that networking giant that’s in the urgent process of rebuilding itself–has, after two years, gotten its UCS-based blade servers to the number three position in the market for blade devices, behind HP and IBM, with a 9.4 percent share of the market. It’s not a bad position to be in when you consider that more than 20 percent of all servers are blades, and that shipments of blades overall grew by more than 5 percent in the quarter, accounting for $1.8 billion in sales.

“After several years of being a highly consolidated market where the top three vendors accounted for over 80% of blade revenue, the recent entry of Cisco has introduced a viable new competitor to the market,” IDC analyst Jed Scaramella said in a statement.

Clearly Lew Tucker, the cloud guru Cisco hired away from Sun Microsystems after it was acquired by Oracle, wasn’t just making things up when he talked to AllThingsD late last year about Cisco’s plans to penetrate the cloud computing business with its UCS–Unified Computing System–offerings. It is a bit of badly needed good news. Cisco says it now has 5,400 UCS customers and is on track to sell $900 million worth of UCS systems this year. Not bad for having no server business at all just a bit more than two years ago. The company also wasted no time in sending the graphic you see below.



(Main image of Lucille Ball looking surprised obviously taken from a still of “I Love Lucy.” The image was so good it was used on the cover of the season 6 DVD set.)

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald