Dell last week fired yet another shot over the bow of rival Cisco Systems, boasting that its revamped Active System Manager is 80 percent faster and nearly 100 percent cheaper than Cisco UCS.
Last Wednesday afternoon US time, Marius Haas, Dell COO and president of enterprise solutions, tweeted: "ASM from @DellConverged is faster, easier to use and costs 95 percent less than Cisco UCS Director."
That tweet followed a similar one from Dell executive director of communications Jim Hahn, who claimed ASM is 80 percent faster to set up and configure than Cisco UCS.
#ASM from @DellConverged is faster, easier to use and costs 95% less than #Cisco UCS Director http://t.co/mbpEJMMdiW
— Marius Haas (@MariusHaas) May 20, 2015
Cisco did not respond for comment at press time.
In a blog published Wednesday US time, Manish Patil, Dell senior director for technical strategy, highlighted the changes that have been made to ASM over the last year-and-a-half.
Cisco UCS Director is a unified converged infrastructure management solution that makes it easier to manage VBlock, FlexPod and Vspex environments. Dell ASM infrastructure provisioning speeds up and simplifies workloads. The changes include making ASM an open architecture with published APIs; a blending of Dell intellectual property and open source technology, Patil wrote.
ASM "is now a critical ingredient in Dell's private cloud solution, provides unified management for our converged infrastructure solutions and will make our reference architecture come to life with template-based automation for rapid and repeatable deployments," Patil wrote.
The claims are the latest round in a barrage of aggressive talk from top Dell execs keen to dig into the enterprise market and do battle with Cisco on its own turf.
In recent months, Dell has ratcheted up the intensity of its competition with enterprise network market leader Cisco, an effort that seemed to gain significant traction with the hiring of Paul Perez as CTO.
Perez arrived at Dell around the same time as new COO Rory Read, and immediately the firm began its marketing assault on Cisco.
Perez had been one of the driving forces behind Cisco UCS, but in an interview with CRN USA, he said, "blades are toward the end of their form-factor life cycle, and UCS has been primarily a blade ecosystem until very recently".
Curtis Hutcheson, the new head of Dell Security Solutions, told CRN USA recently that Dell SonicWall solutions can undercut Cisco security solutions on price by wide margins.
Earlier this week, Cisco partners bemoaned the firm's denial that it would make a play to acquire Nutanix, a move that would give Cisco a foothold in the red-hot hyper-converged market.
Dell began shipping XC Series Nutanix appliances under the Dell brand late last year. Under that deal, Dell is preintegrating the Nutanix software with its own PowerEdge servers.
In a recent Magic Quadrant report on data centre networking, Gartner highlighted Cisco's vulnerability, saying that while the company remains the global market leader in enterprise networking when measured by shipments and revenue, it "is in the middle of a significant challenge to protect its large installed base while keeping pace in the rapidly changing market".
Conversely, Gartner called Dell "the most innovative and disruptive mainstream data centre networking vendor in the market over the past 12 months," and praised the company's "open, agnostic and standards-based approaches to meeting customer requirements in the data centre".
This article originally appeared at crn.com
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