SAN DIEGO — At its Partner Summit here, Cisco announced its latest server offering, taking the converged infrastructure approach it’s been taking with its Unified Computing System (UCS) lineup for many years and bringing it to the edge with the new Unified Edge offering.
The idea of doing a unified appliance for the edge is not a new one, as vendors have sought to offer a cleaner alternative to what Kevin Wollenweber, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s data center and Internet infrastructure business, describes as “the crazy wiring closet” situation many customers have at their branch and other edge deployments.
“You don’t want the baristas having to work on the IT infrastructure in the back,” Wollenweber joked, referring to the challenges of a customer, in this case clearly a chain of coffee shops, being challenged to manage necessary IT infrastructure at stores, branches, and other remote edge deployments.
But for customers, and ultimately for partners, Wollenweber sees the real value being that Unified Edge brings the edge under the purview of Cisco’s Intersight management system and makes it easier for partners to add on the company’s latest security technologies.
“You bring the thing in, you plug it in, and set it up by literally holding your cellphone up to the NFC on it, and you’re off to Intersight and playing with the bog and managing it remotely,” Wollenweber said. “It’s really designed around simplifying the IT and operations side of flooring these systems.”
It continues Cisco’s trend of extending the cloud-managed approach it originally acquired with Meraki and later extended to most of its data centre techology stack towards the edge. That approach should play well with managed service providers, as Intersight is inherently multi-tenant and designed for remote management.
“You can think of this as a tool that allows them to build managed services for customers that want to deploy networking, comptuer and other things on a remote site,” Wollenweber said.
Like UCS, Unified Edge takes a modular approach, which provides some flexibility for customers to buy what they need now and add capacity and performance as those needs grow. Wollenweber suggested that upgradability was particularly important as customers explore what AI will mean for their business. Enterprises may not be exploring deep AI capabilities at the edge of their network today, but with the market and opportunity evolving so quickly, they may in short order.
Also like UCS, Wollenweber said that although Unified Edge brings new technology to bear, it can be lower-cost in both acquisition and TCO because of the reduction of duplication, especially in areas like power supply and networking. That can make it an attractive system for a refresh of current technology, with an eye to future-proofing.
“You deploy it today just as a replacement for existing architectures, and it’s extremely valuable as that,” he said. “And then you have the ability to put in new services, new CPUs, new GPUs, more memory, more storage, over time.”
Wollenweber also stressed the company’s belief that Unified Edge is something only Cisco can do. In his Monday afternoon keynote here, both CEO Chuck Robbins and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel described Cisco as the only company able to go deep on both networking and security.
“None of our security competitors have networking, and none of our networking competitors have security. This is something only we can do together,” Robbins told partners.
Cisco’s Unified Edge SKUs are available now and will be shipping to customers by the end of the year, the company said.
