Cisco rival Brocade recognizes its competitor's attempt to create a "dynamic and virtualized data center" that will improve efficiency of power and operations, but accuses Cisco of locking customers in to just one vendor.
"Achieving this goal is a complex challenge that can be best tackled by a broad ecosystem of industry partners and not based on a proprietary, singular architecture of one company," Brocade said in a written statement. "In contrast, Brocade is already helping customers address these challenges by integrating our networking solutions with a range of mature computing, management and storage technologies from some of the strongest companies in the world. These partnerships are leveraging open interfaces/standards, co-developed technology, and products that are available today, which will lower costs and maximize return on investment for customers."
At Cisco's press conference Monday morning, the company surrounded itself with partners who were naturally more optimistic than Cisco's direct competitors. VMware CEO Paul Maritz said Cisco USC is a "cloud-grade" product that will accelerate the trend toward large-scale virtualization, and said it is incumbent upon the rest of the industry to partner with Cisco because "the whole stack has to work with them." Maritz also said there should no longer be any technical reasons to avoid virtualizing any workload, no matter how demanding it is.