Cisco Systems closed out 2008 at the center of the rumor mill, with the industry watching and speculating that the San Jose, Calif.-based networking giant was soon to make a play in the server game.

In March, that rumor became reality with the revealing of the Unified Computing System (UCS), an architecture that chairman and CEO John Chambers said will "bring together the compute power, the storage access and the networking capabilities" of the next-generation data center and facilitate Cisco's vision of accessing information from any device, any network, any location at any time. UCS also wraps in virtualization, creating a single data center fabric.

UCS will roll out in a limited release through about 30 to 50 solution providers for the rest of 2009 and spread wider with time.

The Unified Computing System includes a host of new Cisco products, foremost two types of Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers, which are based on the Intel Nehalem processor.