It's been rumored that Cisco would move into making its own blade servers, and that rumor turned into a reality last week when the company accounced its Unified Computing effort. A bevy of press releases related to the effort were released by Cisco last Monday, which has the company aiming to unify components of the data center into a single footprint and cut both ownership and operating costs.

The company's new Nehalem-based blade servers have been in design and development for two years and spells bad news for HP, who Cisco has dead in its sights.

"We're going to compete with HP," said Padmasree Warrior, Cisco CTO. "I don't want to sugarcoat that. There is bound to be change in the landscape of who you compete with and who you partner with."

Cisco's blade launch includes partners like BMC, EMC, VMWare, and Microsoft.

Image Credit: Cisco