The 10 Biggest Cisco Stories Of 2009

In March came the debut of Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS), aka Project California, which seeks to combine storage, server, virtualization and networking capabilities in one integrated package. The move not only put it in direct competition with many data center and server stalwarts (such as HP), but also began to entice plenty of Cisco partners looking to expand their practices and add more competencies in data center deployment.



Cisco's rollout of the UCS was slow and deliberate at first, but toward the end of the year came confirmation on pricing, greater detail for both the B-series blade and C-series rack-mount versions of the UCS server, and the kickoff of UCS sales through distribution, with Westcon Group, Ingram Micro and Tech Data the chosen disties. If Cisco had dabbled in a data center strategy in previous years, 2009 was the year it went "all in."