Well, everybody needs to sell a lot of products, but Cisco is particularly needy or else it wouldn’t be in the middle of a restructuring now would it.

So to move a lot of products it’s come with CloudVerse, which isn’t a product, it’s a framework, a “framework that combines the foundational elements – unified data center, cloud-intelligent network and cloud applications – needed to build, manage and connect public, private and hybrid clouds.”

What that means is that it’s stitching existing products together so they can be sold for more money as a package and to sex it up a bit it’s throwing in some new automation, management and collaboration widgetry like a perspective “Cloud-to-Cloud Connect” capability that will allow a data center nearing capacity to push service fulfillment seamlessly to a sister data center.

Such a Networking Positioning System will depend on new Cisco routers due next year.

Anyway, CTO Padmasree Warrior said, “For a long time we’ve provided individual components. What we are doing now is bringing these sets of products together.” Naturally all the moving parts in the CloudVerse vision will work together a whole lot better if customers oblige Cisco and buy the whole infrastructure kit and caboodle from Cisco, particularly its Unified Computing Systems, which aren’t even bringing in a billion dollars a year yet, and of course Cisco’s signature networking.

It’s particularly important to Cisco since the cloud could be 20% of total IT spending next year and, based on Cisco’s recently released Cloud Index, its study of cloud network traffic, the private cloud could account for 50% of enterprise data center computing by 2014.

Cisco is appealing to both folks who want to resell cloud services and those who want a private cloud. It doesn’t want to use CloudVerse itself and go into competition with Amazon.

Apparently it’s been keeping CloudVerse up its sleeve for a while because it says that 70% of leading cloud providers is using CloudVerse and ticks off Fujitsu, Orange Business Services, Silicon Valley Bank, Telecom Italia, Telefónica Spain, Telstra and Verizon Terremark as customers.

The CloudVerse pool of resources won’t limit Cisco to its VCE partner VMware’s virtualization either. Instead, for broader appeal it’ll also include Microsoft’s Hyper-V and Red Hat’s KVM as well as IBM or HP hypervisors for their AIX or HP-UX environments, according to InformationWeek, complements of Intelligent Automation for the Cloud (IAC).

That’s a new software management system assembled from components contributed by Cisco acquisitions Tidal Software and newScale to automate operations environment for virtual servers.

IAC provides a self-service portal, service catalog, orchestration, automated provisioning, lifecycle management and pay-per-use tracking. Meanwhile, Cisco’s new policy-based Network Services Manager can configure and modify both virtualized network components in a cloud environment. \

Cisco claims that moving from a traditional virtualized data center to a CloudVerse cloud can reduce IT total cost of ownership (opex and capex) by up to 50% and reduce the time to offer new cloud services from weeks to minutes.

Having left its party manners at home it told everybody who would listen that Cisco is the master of complexity, high prices and that dirtiest word of all, lock-in.

“Single-vendor, proprietary approaches such as Cisco’s lock in customers while driving up cost and complexity with different architectures required at each point in the network, including data center, campus and branch. This lack of convergence and increased complexity make it difficult to roll out new applications and services.”

Naturally it’s got an alternative – a just-announced FlexNetwork architecture that it expects to eat Cisco’s lunch.

It’s an ideal time for HP to move while Cisco, its market leadership under pressure and its investor base fleeing, is distracted by restructuring and cost cutting.

Anyway, HP’s single architecture approach is supposed to unify network silos across the data center, campus and branch bringing consistency and performance to what is otherwise “disjointed” and making it easier for users to leverage chi-chi technologies like cloud computing, virtualization, mobility and media-rich content.

It’s supposed to do wonders future-proofing legacy networks, where it claims there’s been little innovation in the last 10 years.

A core component of HP’s vaunted Converged Infrastructure, the widgetry is based on modular building blocks – so it can be incrementally introduced – and open industry standards like OSPF v2 and v3, HP preens, as opposed to Cisco’s stash of patented gotchas like its EIGRP protocol.

FlexNetwork consists of:

* FlexFabric, which converges network, compute and storage across virtual and physical environments in the name of hybrid cloud computing;
* FlexCampus, which converges wired and wireless networks to deliver identity-based access to multimedia content;
* FlexBranch, which converges network functionality, security and services at the branch;
* And riding herd on the others FlexManagement, which converges network infrastructure management and orchestration.

HP toted up the number and says that by itself its single-pane-of-glass management tool does what it takes Cisco 30 different tools to do. Its latest Intelligent Management Center (IMC) 5 widgetry manages HP’s entire networking portfolio as well as more than 2,600 network devices from over 35 vendors, more than 1,000 of which are Cisco’s.

It claims it manages Cisco better than Cisco manages itself.

The stuff automatically discovers virtual machines and virtual switches and their relationship to the physical network. HP means to add automatic synchronization of network connectivity information with its Virtual Connect technology for server blades and automate the process of creating a server profile further, moving a step closer to one-button cloud provisioning.

And since the exercise is all about dumping on Cisco, HP trotted out a new A-series 10500 campus core switch for delivering media-rich applications – HP paints campus architectures as the forgotten man in other people’s schema – that are supposed to offer 75% lower latency, 250% more switching capacity and 270% more 10GbE density than Cisco’s Catalyst 6509.

The thing can be virtualized into a super core with 208 wire-speed 10GbE ports for large campuses.

Mind you the campus switch segment is supposed to be the largest segment of the worldwide Ethernet switch market, forecast to reach $13.7 billion this year up from $12 billion last year.

For the access layer of the FlexCampus HP’s got new line cards for HP E5400 and E8200 switches that are supposed deliver up to 90% lower latency, 600% higher throughput, 128% more port density and 35% less energy consumption than the Cisco’s Catalyst 4506.

On the security side – where legacy solutions sometimes only protect physical environments supporting single workloads – HP’s got a new Tipping Point S6100N Intrusion Protection appliance that propagates standard security policies across a data center, campus, branch and WAN and is supposed to automatically build in protection as virtual machines are created or moved across an enterprise.

It’s a single solution for physical, virtual and cloud environments that reportedly offers 60% higher performance than the previous generation and can inspect up to 16 Gbps of high-bandwidth application traffic in real-time to improve the availability of mission-critical services.

It’s supposed to have 100% greater performance than Cisco’s 4270 at 33% less power and reportedly discovered 309 vulnerabilities to Cisco’s one. (Ouch!)

The appliance is available now for $209,995.The A10500 switch should be available in the second half at prices starting at $38,000. IMC 5.0 is due next month for $6,995; IMC 5.1 should be available by the end of the year.

By the way, HP’s waving around a study that says that 75% of 90 Cisco resellers that account for $5 billion in revenue acknowledge that HP is part of the sales discussion and that 29% of them find HP influencing the terms of the deals.

The Acadia joint venture oddly appended to the original VCE Coalition is gone, its integration functions transferred to VCE, the company. Acadia’s hallmark professional services seem to have disappeared entirely, gone to partners.

The restructuring is supposed to simplify the way the coalition does business but obviously the old structure didn’t work. The streamlined entity, still a work in progress, is supposed to correct its failing, shushing reseller complaints about Acadian competition and getting a fire lit under sales.

According to VCE chairman and CEO Michael Capellas, “As one entity under a single management structure, VCE can scale more rapidly to meet market demand while ensuring that our efforts are tightly aligned with the needs of our customers and partners.”

VCE reckons its total incremental market opportunity exceeds $100 billion and that its supply chain capacity can support a billion dollars in bookings. With a hundred customers, it’s believed to be operating under that potential.

Once the CEO of Compaq before he sold it to HP, Capellas was originally brought in as CEO of Acadia Enterprises LLC and chairman of the VCE Coalition.

Presumably the old ownership arrangements maintain. The Acadia joint venture was between Cisco and EMC with VMware and Intel as minority investors.

VCE will now do all product development, integration, pre-sales and support. It will move Acadia’s pre-configured Vblock Infrastructure Platforms, concocted out of Cisco’s Intel-based servers and networking, EMC’s storage and security and VMware virtualization, through the 120 resellers the coalition has reportedly assembled and apparently through the Cisco, EMC and VMware sales machines. It will need to wrestle with the implicit channel conflicts.

Acadia was supposed to build, operate and transfer Vblock infrastructure to customers, half of which were expected to be end users, half service providers.

VCE is reportedly abandoning the reference architectures Acadia started with for turnkey SKUs shipped fully configured from factories in Ireland and Massachusetts at fixed prices – not prices negotiated as you go with each of its three parents separately.

There’s now supposed to be an integrated two-year product roadmap and the ability to upgrade system components as they happen from each of the threesome – not way later – as well as code updates at fixed intervals.

Reseller can apparently expect third-party training programs and market development funds.

For its part, VCE has 500 people and is reportedly hiring. Its people are increasingly its own rather than on loan from its parents and it’s supposed to up the number of Centers of Excellence it has globally to show off the widgetry to tire-kicking prospects.

It’s looking for growth lacking it elsewhere in its portfolio although the virtualized desktop market is still pretty small, only worth $24 million this year by IDC’s count

Cisco’s hoping the promise of 51% lower PC support costs, which account for 67% of PC-related IT expenses, might do it.

It says it can unify data center, collaboration and networking architectures into one system. Such things are supposed to be more secure than traditional desktops by keeping data in-house.

Cisco is going to trot out two small sub-$500 “zero” clients in March that support VMware’s View 4.5 and Citrix’ XenDesktop – as well as video and video conferencing (Cisco’s latest bywords and not easily virtualized). They will run off of Cisco’s network-savvy servers back in the data center, which is what it really wants to sell along with services.

VXI is supposed to reduce the TCO of desktop virtualization solutions by increasing the number of virtual desktops that can be hosted on each server by 60%.

The widgetry will support storage from EMC and NetApp as well as Cisco’s IP Phones and apparently anybody’s smartphones.

By March Cisco newfangled business-oriented Android-customized Cius tablet will also be out. It’s supposed to support VMware View, Citrix Receiver and Wyse PocketCloud virtualization software too and run virtualized Microsoft software off the cloud.

Cisco’s new zero clients are designed to run off of Ethernet lines and only need 10W of power to run as opposed to the traditional PC’s 300W.

VXI integrates Cisco’s Collaboration, Data Center Virtualization and Borderless Networks and a bunch of its other technologies. It’ll try peddling a couple of videoconferencing screens: a 21-inch for $6,900 and a 32-inch for $23,900.

It earned a record 43 cents a share, or 33 cents net, up 79%, on sales worth a record $10.8 billion, up 27% year-over-year, which seemed to say spending is coming back. Only trouble was the numbers didn’t match or better yet exceed Wall Street’s rosier forecasts of 42 cents on $10.88 billion. And its margin slipped a point sequentially to 64% in part because of supply shortages.

Cisco said it ran into a disconcerting “mixed signal pattern that we haven’t seen before.”

Orders dropped for maybe four weeks between late June and early July then the pattern confusingly reversed itself. Only you don’t know whether Cisco influenced that turnabout. Its overall product orders were up 23% in the quarter.

Not only did Cisco fail to manage expectations but CEO John Chambers, who has become something of a Wall Street early warning system, made seemingly contradictory statements Wednesday and Thursday about seeing “unusual uncertainty” surrounding spending and jobs, with his customers forecasting only 2% growth in the second half, but Cisco squeezing 12%-18% growth out of that this quarter. And everyone knows John’s a glass half-full kinda guy.

Well, Cisco dropped an initial 9.4% after hours Wednesday only to worsen Thursday to 9.99% and take practically the whole tech sector down with it during a week when the bears came out again in earnest.

After multiple repetitions of the same story it’s still unclear what Chambers thinks will really happen with IT spending going forward other than that the recovery looks like it’s going to be very slow, if not imperceptible, like the Federal Reserve said Tuesday.

Still he said on the basis of things Cisco can “control or influence” it’ll do a conservative $10.64 billion to $10.83 billion this quarter, up 18%-20%. Unfortunately Wall Street wanted projections of $10.95 billion.

Chambers still maintains the possibility of a double dip is “relatively low.” (From your mouth to God’s ear, Johnny boy.)

As an indication of Cisco’s confidence, Chambers said the company would hire another 3,000 people, mostly in the US, the next couple of quarters. It hired 2,000 last quarter. Some observers consider the move risky.

There was a lot of downgrading going on Thursday.

Gartner Tuesday pulled in its second-half worldwide spending projections from up 4.1% in April to up only 2.9%.

It’s not going to renew HP’s long-time systems integrator contract when it expires on April 30.

That means HP won’t be a Cisco Certified Channel or Global Service Alliance partner anymore because Cisco Certified Channel or Global Service Alliance partners get proprietary Cisco information like product roadmaps and discounts and that’s kinda silly when HP and Cisco are competing for business.

Cisco sent its senior VP of worldwide partner organization Keith Goodwin out to deliver this message on YouTube.

He said Cisco’s “relationship with HP has evolved from a partner to companies with different and conflicting visions of how to deliver value to companies” and that “for Cisco to lead market transitions… we must align with and invest in partners who share out network-centric vision.”

This pretty pass is the result of Cisco trying to elbow its way into the server business that HP dominates and HP retaliating by launching its ProCurve line, buying 3Com and partnering with Qlogic to push into Cisco’s networking preserve. HP’s data center/cloud pact with Microsoft probably didn’t help anymore than Cisco’s alignment with EMC and VMware.

HP, in response, issued a statement taking the moral high ground and saying that Cisco should rise above the fray. “Most major players compete in one deal and partner in others to best serve clients’ needs. We do not believe it is in the customer’s best interest to take a proprietary stance.”

Goodwin says Cisco is willing to entertain a different kind of arrangement with HP. “We have already reached out to HP to begin the discussion around a new agreement that ensures business continuity for existing customers and better reflects the current state of our relationship.”

According to Ovum “HP needs Cisco more than Cisco needs HP” because HP’s networking portfolio still can’t go one-on-one with Cisco’s widgetry. HP reportedly sells about a billion dollars worth of Cisco gear a year, and its own storage and servers on top of that.

That seems short-term and fixable. The damage to Cisco – well, the Cisco as we know it – could be deeper. What’s it gonna do when IBM, Dell and Sun’s contracts run out?

See Cisco’s positioning for yourself at http://blogs.cisco.com/channels/comments/ciscos_evolving_partner_landscape/.

It means they’ll have some recommended, pre-tested, and validated end-to-end configurations that they’ll promote as their so-called Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture (SMDA) – basically blueprints, implementation tips and best practices – that they all support globally 24×7 to get the enterprise virtualized faster.

And that’s good for VMware, which means it’s ultimately good for parent EMC especially since this new alliance lacks the Vblock bundles and the Acadia joint venture of the Cisco-VMware-EMC axis.

The scheme is supposed to enhance security in public and private cloud environments by isolating the IT resources and applications of different clients, business units or departments that share a common IT infrastructure. In other words segment and isolate the workloads.

It’s supposed to enable enterprises, integrators and service providers to deliver IT as a service (ITaaS). The trio’s partners will sell the stuff.

And naturally it involves vSphere/vCenter/vShield, Cisco’s UCS servers and 10 gigE Nexus switches, and NetApp’s FAS storage with its Multistore partitioning software and anticipates moving data and applications around hybrid clouds.

Everything exists; the customer just has to pick from the Chinese menu and get it put together.

It’s supposed to help administrators establish the appropriate quality of service for each resource layer and deliver consistent service performance levels for the applications in each layer.

Presumably they took the name from the ancient Greeks who used the word to mean a refuge or idyllic place and not the uprooted and deported North American Acadia captured in Longfellow’s magnificent tear-jerker “Evangeline,” although Cisco’s new enemies IBM and HP may try to persuade users that it is.

Anyway, Cisco, EMC and VMware – with at least the encouragement of their silent partner Intel – have also formed what they call the Virtual Computing Environment coalition to push on-premise and hosted private cloud computing created out of Cisco’s Intel Xeon-based Unified Computing Systems (UCS) and networking, EMC’s storage and security and VMware’s virtualization to large accounts and service providers through third parties.

The coalition, which will claim more of their resources, talent and investment than the joint venture, will consist of an ecosystem of VARs, service providers, channel partners and ISVs and to start includes the big system integrators Accenture, Capgemini, CSC, Lockheed Martin, Tata Consulting Services and Wipro.

It’s supposed to advance Cisco’s fortunes in the data center against IBM and HP, both of which are ticked at Cisco’s temerity in daring to try to break into servers – and neither is likely to be any happier with this alliance. Their only consolation may be that Cisco’s boxes haven’t gotten a ringing endorsement from users – at least not yet.

What they might like even less, however, is EMC CEO Joe Tucci’s contention that no one company can deliver everything that’s needed in this leg of technology and that he and his mates have a major leg up on the kind of collegiality that will be needed going forward, the kind of partnership that – according to Cisco CEO John Chambers – “will change the data center and the cloud forever.”

The three companies are going to be pooling their roadmaps and sharing and relinquishing control of their most sacred customer information to each other. And Chambers said the “leap of faith” involved in such a situation “begins at the top,” adding “I trust Joe with my life.” Chambers, by the way, once worked for Tucci and their relationship goes back decades.

McKinsey estimates that the market they’re shooting for will be worth $85 billion by 2015, or 20% of worldwide spending on data center infrastructure and services.

Acadia is characterized as an accelerator for users that want to get out of the blocks fast. It and the coalition are going to peddle and support what are called Vblock infrastructure packages – integrated, tested, validated, ready-to-grow configurations of the quartet’s virtualization, networking, computing, storage, security and management technologies.

The companies say that early Vblock customer trials have delivered up to 40% reductions in the cost of operating and managing virtualized data center infrastructures, a major come-on.

The first kits out the door this quarter from third parties include a mid-range Vblock 1 and a high-end Vblock 2. An entry-level Vblock 0 is due next year.

Vblock 2 supports 3,000-6,000 virtual machines and is built out of Cisco’s UCS boxes and Nexus 1000v and Multilayer Directional Switches (MDS); EMC’s Symmetrix V-Max storage and RSA security; and VMware’s vSphere platform.

Vblock 1 supports 800-3,000 virtual machines and uses EMC’s CLARiiON storage.

Vblock 0, when it gets here, will support 300-800 virtual machines and use EMC’s Unified Storage. It will target medium-sized businesses, small data centers or organizations and be used for test and development by channel partners, systems integrators, service providers, ISVs and customers.

Pricing on Vblock, which won’t brook any substitutions of outside hardware or software, is hard to pin down because each account will be different but will range from hundreds of thousands to many millions of dollars.

The companies said the widgetry can scale with additional computer and storage claiming that’s a key differentiator compared to other people’s monolithic systems.

Their calling card will be virtualization because it’s the hinge on which the whole door swings. VMware CEO Paul Maritz says that the triumvirate is also working to ensure that users can get out of the cloud as well as into it. It’s not meant to be, as the song says, the Hotel California from which there is no escape.

EMC has also come up with Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager for Vblock, which is designed to support a wide range of enterprise management consoles. EMC’s RSA security is layered on the Vblock architecture for policy management of identity, data and infrastructure but doesn’t mean the customer has to reduce the security software it already has in place.

The companies mean to bring out other Vblock packages including virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

Chambers said the companies are working on “seven or eight things,” but identified none of them.

Besides pre-sales, the coalition will hawk a bunch of professional services including a Cloud-based Business Advisory Service, Private Cloud Strategic Impact Advisory Service, Private Cloud Architecture Impact Advisory Service, Virtual Desktop Advisory Service, Cloud Computing Strategy Service, and Vblock Design and Implementation Service.

Acadia, meanwhile, is supposed to build, initially operate and ultimately transfer Vblock infrastructure to the customers, half of which are likely to be end users and half service providers.

The engagements – and they’re only talking about a “modest number” of accounts that want to get up fast – should run from 18 months to three years. The companies see Acadia as something of a knowledge repository, heavy on white papers, and training. There will be problem re-creation labs. It should begin customer operations in Q1. It reportedly has no signed contracts yet.

The infrastructure-as-a-service Acadia venture will have its own CEO but the companies haven’t picked him yet. They’re recruiting. Otherwise Acadia will consist of 130 people described as the trio’s “top talent.”

The companies aren’t explaining how much was or will be invested in the venture or by whom only that EMC and Cisco are the principals.

The coalition’s management is more amorphous. Supposedly the three CEOs are running it; more practically they’ve delegated their senior lieutenants to see it thrives day-to-day, folks like Howard Elias and Pat Gelsinger and in turn Dennis Hoffman at EMC, Gary Moore and Rob Lloyd and in turn Manjula Talreja at Cisco and Brian Byun at VMware. This bears watching to see how it shakes out since there’s no real quarterback.

Where EMC’s Atmos cloud widgetry may or may not fit in the grand scheme of things is unclear.

Based on broad hints from the companies, which were already joined at the hip, the Wall Street Journal got wind of the joint venture in September and said it was code named Alpine. They’ve reportedly been working on it for the last three-and-a-half years, intently the last six months.

The mid-sized company opened its barrage at the New York Stock Exchange, a new Juniper customer, on the 40th anniversary of ARPAnet.

It claims the Internet and its newfangled cloud progeny – which are doing things they weren’t designed to do – are cracking under the load and are going to spin out of orbit any minute now. The model they’re built on isn’t going to work going forward, it said.

But fear not. It has the solution.

It’s called the “New Network” and the vision, which called for Juniper to dream up with a new logo, is supposed to reinvent the network and the economics of networking and save the day complements of its new software, silicon, systems and partnerships.

Juniper is, for instance, promising to roll out new line cards and routers that process two to four times more traffic than the competition.

Its soon-to-be new flagship MX960 router, due out in December, is supposed to be able to download the entire contents of the Library of Congress in 12 seconds and access 8.5 million iTunes in a tenth of a second, 50 Blu-Ray DVDs in less than five seconds, 10 years of Hubble Telescope data in a minute and 430,000 HDTV channels simultaneously.

It will be built around a 65nm Junos Trio chipset, part of a new Junos One processor family, that’s supposed to let networks scale dynamically and provide more bandwidth, subscribers and services all at the same time – no compromise, Juniper says.

It also claims breakthroughs in delivering rich business, residential and mobile services at massive scale at half the power per gigabit.

The chipset, code named Trinity, cost $80 million and five years to develop and there are 30 patents pending on the thing.

The purpose-built, industry-first “network instruction set,” built into the silicon, is supposed to combine the performance benefits of ASICs with the flexibility of network processors and yield total router throughput of 2.6 terabits a second and nimbly manage 2.3 million subscribers on a rack.

The glory of widgetry, however, is a technology called 3D Scaling responsible for the breathtaking numbers.

Juniper calls 3D Scaling “one of those rare technology breakthroughs that can change business models” and it intends to use the secret sauce in its switches and security products too.

It claims the widgetry will offer a potential 540% increase in ROI over five years, improve power efficiency by 10 to one over other vendors, and cut aggregation services opex by a possible 47%, business services opex by up to 63%, and residential services by maybe 77%.

Of course what’s a router without software, and the keystone of Juniper’s platform is Junos, its updated open network operating system, Juniper’s answer to Cisco’s Internetwork Operating System (IOS).

The software now also includes Junos Space, available at prices starting at $15,000, and Junos Pulse, coming in the first half of next year.

Space is an open network application development and deployment platform, an SDK and an API meant to be used by third parties although it hasn’t been yet.

Pulse is an integrated multi-service network client that’s supposed to reduce the number of client applications that have to be distributed and supported and provide the location-aware and identity-aware access to networks that are currently available from Juniper in separate network clients.

Space is supposed to simplify network operations, automate support and accelerate service delivery. It ships initially pre-loaded with three Juniper-provided applications: Ethernet Activator, which is supposed to activate services, including VPN services, up to 10 times faster than the competition; Route Analyzer, from Packet Design, a company Juniper put money in a year ago, which is supposed to provide DVR-like recording and playback capability to plan, simulate and troubleshoot MPLS networks; and the very sensible time-saving Service Now, which is supposed resolve service issues by having Juniper systems “call” Juniper support experts with troubleshooting data and details.

And for the cloud people Juniper will have gateways in the first half that reportedly scale to support 10 million concurrent user sessions – 2.5 times more than Juniper’s previous generation and five times more than Cisco.

The company also say the gateways can deliver up to six times faster firewall and seven times faster intrusion prevention services at a 50% power savings and 67% space savings over Cisco for comparable throughput.

It also got a bunch of tools for securing cloud services along with new support for VMware and Citrix.

Apparently Microsoft’s going to be using Juniper’s widgetry in Azure.

IBM, which cut a Cisco-snubbing OEM deal with Juniper in July because of Cisco’s adventure into servers, is going to pick up Juniper’s upcoming gateways in addition to its Ethernet switches and routers and sell them under the IBM label.

IBM and Juniper already have a collaborative single fabric project called Stratus that’s supposed to simplify the cloud infrastructure by reducing components and collapsing tiers, share pools of resources and secure everything – yada yada yada – that they announced in February. No more news on that score.

Dell has also spit in Cisco’s eye and is going to sell Juniper Networks’ widgets direct and indirect under its PowerConnect brand.

The stuff includes Juniper’s MX routers, EX Ethernet switches and SRX gateways, all running Junos, the same stuff as IBM.

Forget that Dell already carries stuff like this from Brocade; that only underscores its message to Cisco.

Dell and Juniper are planning to work together on open, standards-based solutions for virtualized data centers and deliver technology solutions using Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE), a k a Data Center Bridging (DCB) and iSCSI to improve network economics. They mean to deliver a secure network infrastructure from a customer’s traditional data center out to its branch offices, remote workers, customers and business partners and provide orchestrated management of users, workloads and data – in the name of avoiding single-vendor lock-in.

Dell also plans to market, service and support Juniper’s high-performance networking solutions.

Meanwhile, Blade Network Technologies has licensed Junos, Juniper’s first licensing deal, to develop blade server switches under an exclusive arrangement that sees it sell them to server makers worldwide.

Blade, a big player in the space, will put its value-added data center features on the switches, such as network-aware VMready virtualization, AMP Active Multi-Pathing technology, HotLinks for high availability as well as offer a vNIC (Virtual Network Interface Card), OFM (Open Fabric Manager) and Advanced OFM.

Juniper also claims to have the first 120 Gbps line card with highest 10GE density for aggregation, video distribution, data center and edge routing; the industry’s only edge routing with line-rate 100GbE performance for edge uplink, inter-data center and high-bandwidth aggregation; the industry’s most powerful 3.5-inch routers (eight times faster than competitors) designed for delivering Carrier Ethernet services for multi-tenant buildings, as well as mobile aggregation, video and enterprise edge deployments; an Active Broadband Networks application in development for monitoring cable bandwidth and improving cable subscriber experiences; an Ankeena Networks application for video streaming and caching to enable low-cost, TV-like viewing; and a coy Project Falcon reference architecture for the mobile space.

That mean it’ll be stepping on even more toes than it already has by entering the server market to begin with.

Resisting the volume label, Cisco positions the new UCS C-Series boxes as investment-protecting stepping stones to its bigger UCS B-Series that unite compute, storage and networking in the name of unleashing virtualization. It claims compute can’t be bought in isolation anymore.

Cisco claims architectural superiority for its UCS widgetry and promises greater power and agility and lower TCO than the current crop of systems vendors can deliver. Buy the vision buy the box.

Cisco research says UCS addresses a $20 billion slice of an overall $85 billion data center market counting hardware, software, networking and services.

The company had Goldman Sachs talk to a hundred of the Fortune 1000 and it looks like two-thirds of them can accept Cisco turning over a new leaf and becoming a server provider and may buy some of its boxes in the next two or three years but only 18% plan to evaluate the things in the next 12 months.

Presumably the findings prodded the company to come up with the market share-accelerating C-Series, which won’t be available until Q4 when Cisco will presumably reveal what it’ll cost. The UCS B-Series blade servers start shipping this month.

Cisco’s channels director John Growdon said that 72% of the resellers Cisco expects to tap, folks that already handle its traditional networking infrastructure widgetry, sell competing servers. The company has come up with new C-Series partner programs and says it will soon have about 500 resellers certified.

It’s promising them revenues from assessments, integration services, managed services and the like.

The Xeon 5500-based C-Series consists of one 1U and two 2U models. The 1U C200 M1 can have 96GB of memory in 12 DIMMs, four 3.5-inch SAS or SATA drives and room for two PCIe cards. The 2U C210 M1 can expand to 16 SFF SAS or SATA drives and five PCIe cards and the top-of-the-line C250 M1 can go to 384GB of memory (48 DIMMs) and eight drives.

Cisco says its patented memory extension technology yields upwards of 2.5 times the addressable memory than competitive rack servers and hence more virtual machines and the scalability to run large memory applications.

The widgets can access Cisco’s unified fabric through a low-latency lossless 10 Gbps Ethernet connection. And they can take advantage of Cisco’s virtualized adapter, which is supposed to offer adapter consolidation and virtualization optimization by enabling each virtualized adapter to define up to 128 Ethernet or Fibre Channel connections.

Cisco, however, is trying to be open about this whole thing and says other less functional adapters can be used.