Entering into a new competitive segment, especially one dominated by major players with well-staked out turf, requires a level of hyperbole, dramatic positioning and a differentiable product. Cisco has certainly achieved all this and more in the first two years of shipment of its UCS product, and shows no signs of fatigue to date.

However, Cisco’s announcement this week that it is now part of Microsoft’s Fast Track Data Warehouse and Fast Track OLTP program is a sign that UCS is also entering the mainstream of enterprise technology. The Microsoft Fast Track program, offering a set of reference architectures, system specification and sizing guides for both common usage scenarios for Microsoft SQL Server, is not new, nor is it in any way unique to Cisco. Fast Track includes Dell, HP, IBM, and Bull. The fact that Cisco will now get equal billing from Microsoft in this program is significant – it is the beginning of the transition from emerging fringe to mainstream , and an endorsement to anyone in the infrastructure business that Cisco is now appearing on the same stage as the major incumbents.

Will this represent a breakthrough revenue opportunity for Cisco? Probably not, since Microsoft will be careful not to play favorites and will certainly not risk alienating its major systems partners, but Cisco’s inclusion on this list is another incremental step in becoming a mainstream server supplier. Like the chicken soup that my grandmother used to offer, it can’t hurt.

In a recent discussion with a group of infrastructure architects, power architecture, especially UPS engineering, was on the table as a topic. There was general agreement that UPS systems are a necessary evil, cumbersome and expensive beasts to put into a DC, and a lot of speculation on alternatives. There was general consensus that the goal was to develop a solution that would be more granular install and deploy and thus allow easier and ad-hoc decisions about which resources to protect, and agreement that battery technologies and current UPS architectures were not optimal for this kind of solution.

So what if someone were to suddenly expand battery technology R&D investment by a factor of maybe 100x of R&D and into battery technology,  expand high-capacity battery production by a giant factor, and drive prices down precipitously? That’s a tall order for today’s UPS industry, but it’s happening now courtesy of the auto industry and the anticipated wave of plug-in hybrid cars. While batteries for cars and batteries for computers certainly have their differences in terms of depth and frequency of charge/discharge cycles, packaging, lifespan, etc, there is little doubt that investments in dense and powerful automotive batteries and power management technology will bleed through into the data center. Throw in recent developments in high-charge capacitors (referred to in the media as “super capacitors”), which add the impedance match between the requirements for spike demands and a chemical battery’s dislike of sudden state changes, and you have all the foundational ingredients for major transformation in the way we think about supplying backup power to our data center components.