Cisco's UCS Next Year's Servers This Fall

When the rest of the blogosphere went crazy over Cisco's UCS
announcement pronouncing it the biggest change in the data center since the
microprocessor I was skeptical to say the least. While others touted they had
management software that did the admin's job for him and revolutionary
networking that made IBM and HP blade servers look like Model T Fords. I failed
to understand the excitement.

To me UCS was another player in the blade server market.
After all I had just, ok a month before, been reading reports from some of the
same analysts that were now touting UCS as a breakthrough saying that Dell was
no threat to IBM, HP and Sun (OK they missed that one) because their biggest
server was a 4 socket x86. If Dell wasn't and enterprise player because they
didn't have big Unix systems or mainframes how was Cisco with just 3 models of
2 socket blades that much better?

Wondering if I might be wrong I went back to the Cisco site
and found almost no details about the hardware just platitudes about how the
integrated servers, management software, networking and storage would make
everyone's life easier. This confused me even more as UCS has no storage. Not
even the storage blades HP has running Lefthand that let you run a whole branch
office from a single blade chassis.  EMC
blogger Chuck Hollis was even saying UCS was better for not having storage as
the HP storage was something you couldn't tell from Shineola.

I even went to LULU.COM, bought, and read, Silvano Gai's
book looking for what made UCS different.