Mixed messaging might not help Cisco customers
Colin Lynch defies the marketing department and uses the 'S' word - storage - in relation to UCS Invicta
I have been asked many times over the past few months for my views on Cisco UCS Invicta, the first product to come from Cisco's acquisition of Whiptail last October.
That is the first important thing to note: just how recent this acquisition was. To have a product released within such a short period of time is a feat in itself.
A lot of the commentary I have read about Cisco UCS Invicta so far, though, has not been about the technology but the politics: how it could affect relationships with Cisco's traditional storage partners.
I have experienced this politics first hand, as I have attended numerous meetings and workshops with Whiptail, now called the Solid State Systems Group (S3G) within Cisco.
I was also fortunate enough to speak to Whiptail CTO James Candelaria at Cisco Live Milan in January – and the tension and sensitivity associated with UCS Invicta was clear. The result was that the planned Cisco UCS Invicta launch was dropped from the event.
The "S" word – by which I mean "storage" – has apparently now been forbidden in association with UCS Invicta.
However, the "S" word swear jar would be overflowing already, from the number of times I have heard the word during conversations with S3G.
It appears that the word "storage" has been banned because Cisco marketing bods believe UCS Invicta should be positioned otherwise to the market.
The fact is, this product was "storage" pre-acquisition and is now deemed to be "memory" post-acquisition.
Another mixed message is that some of the products with which Whiptail competed pre-acquisition are suddenly no longer viewed as competitors. Clearly, however, they still are.
Along with that, Cisco UCS Invicta in its current form is a standalone all-flash array that connects into any vendor's SAN switch, providing storage (putting another £1 in the swear jar) to any vendor's servers.
Yet UCS Invicta is supported only when used to provide storage to a Cisco UCS environment. This again is a strange concept: why would a vendor dictate to its customers like that, and thereby limit who its customers can be?
This is equivalent to a supermarket allowing only its own staff to shop there.
The truth behind the confusion and mixed messaging is simple.
The message is way ahead of the product. The product as it is today is basically the product as it was pre-acquisition – that is, a standalone all-flash array.
Admittedly, the message is where the product is heading. That is, an application accelerator for I/O and bandwidth-intensive Cisco UCS workloads.
Once you appreciate where UCS Invicta is heading, the marketing messaging and those strange, artificially imposed restrictions make perfect sense.
The road map for Invicta will no doubt be to integrate tighter and tighter with Cisco UCS until it is just another component of the Cisco UCS ecosystem.
Once this happens, it's obvious UCS Invicta will be supported only in a Cisco UCS environment and the transition from "standalone all-flash storage array" to "application accelerator for I/O and bandwidth-intensive Cisco UCS workloads" will be complete.
But in the meantime let's call a duck a duck. No one is to stone anyone, even – and I want to make this absolutely clear – if they do say the word "storage".
Colin Lynch is principal consultant for services at Computacenter