IBM

Cisco UCS Announcement

Hi folks, today Cisco made their big announcement regarding their Unified Computing System. At the heart of this system is Cisco’s new UCS 5100 Blade Server Chassis. This chassis can hold up to 8 blade servers and 2 fabric extenders within a 6 RU enclosure.

UCS is being marketed as an all in one enclosure that contains many components such as the blade enclosure, the servers, fabric interconnects, a management module etc.

Cisco is going head to head with their long time partners IBM and HP by making this announcement. It remains to be seen if Cisco can make any headway in a market that they historically have not competed in during these hard economic times.

Win or lose, Cisco is sure to turn some heads. One thing is for sure, Cisco has always been one to innovate, and will most certaintly keep everyone on their toes by entering this space.

You can read more about UCS here.

-RP

Massive layoffs sweeping the IT industry

Well it looks like we’re getting even more bad news this year….

Microsoft, IBM and Intel have announced massive layoffs. The buzz about the Net is that Microsoft is going to layoff 5000 people, Intel is going to cut about the same and IBM is going to be laying off people with no specific number announced yet….although according to rumours it could be 3 times as much as the other guys.

So what’s going on here? It’s quite simple really, it doesn’t matter how big you are, you can’t dodge the economic crisis that has gripped the nation. Even the big boys are going to have to tighten their belts.

What I find interesting is that IBM has beat all of Wall Street’s expectations despite the economic crunch and they’re still laying people off. What does a company have to do to not have to lay people off during these times?

-RP