Try as it might, Dell is just having a hard time getting any traction in the unified data center market that HP and Cisco are fighting over.
 
HP recently began touting its line of ProCurve switches as an alternative to Cisco’s hardware. Cisco shot back at HP’s blade dominance by rolling out its Unified Computing Systems (UCS), which combines network, compute, storage, virtualization and servers into one cohesive fabric.
 
The competition between the two California companies will only heat up as Cisco rolls out more UCS fabrics and HP undoubtedly fires back with its own data center offerings.
 
And then there’s Dell, trying hard to play catch-up, tagging along like a little brother who isn’t quite mature enough to join in the real adventures. Despite the lack of attention, however, Dell is starting to catch up with its more established (at least in this market segment) competitors.
 
Dell today agreed to an OEM partnership with Juniper to resell its MX series routers, EX series Ethernet switches, SRX Series Services Gateways and JUNOS software platform.
 
The Juniper development comes about two months after Dell teamed up with Brocade for an OEM partnership focused on storage networking.
 
One of the key pieces, though, might be the partnership the third largest computer maker in the U.S. inked with Marlborough, Mass-based Egenera. The Egenera PAN Manager helps reduce the cost and complexity of Dell’s data center play, centralizing the hardware.
 
These three companies -- Brocade, Juniper and Egenera -- bring routers, switches, virtualization and storage to Dell’s all-in-one data center offering. Suddenly it seems like Dell is catching up to HP and Cisco. So why isn’t Dell part of the conversation? Why is Round Rock more Mr. Roper instead of Jack Tripper?
 
One theory might be because Dell’s strength has traditionally been in distribution and marketing -- the company is about assembling things and not engineering them. Cisco and HP, on the other hand have excelled in those areas.
 
Dell is also OEMing and entering into partnerships for pieces of a unified data center solution instead of creating it in-house -- again playing to its strength as a distributor rather than a creator. But let’s not forget that Dell was started on those principles in a dorm room and eventually climbed to some pretty rarified air.
 
Whether or not that strategy sticks for the data center, however, remains to be seen.