It's why they rolled out FabricPath before TRILL is ratified by the IETF; they want to show that they are leading the industry. While Cisco tried to be clear that once TRILL was ratified, they would support it on the Nexus, the message came across is that users would have to choose between FabricPath or TRILL. That caused much commotion about Cisco trying to force proprietary protocols to induce lock-in. All vendors want to be your single-source for whatever they do. Cisco is no better or worse in that regard, as Schuchart points out, and I agree. But in the case of FabricPath, the plan is that TRILL will be supported on the NX-OS and you will be able to run FabricPath and TRILL concurrently and will be able to interoperate with Cisco Nexus and non-Cisco switches that support TRILL forming one big happy fabric.
That aligns with Chambers's statement during a press meeting I attended at CiscoLive that "HP is going to be in the data center for a long time. Cisco is going to be in the data center for a long time. Our products will work together, but you will get value add if you go with Cisco [for computing and networking]. It's a major tactical mistake to make customers choose between vendors [all or nothing]." Pretty savvy thinking. A part of pie is better than no pie and a piece of pie means Cisco still has an "in" in the data center. Yes, Cisco wants to sell you servers and networking, but just networking will do. They can keep talking about expanding their products into your data center that way, and Cisco is not unique in this approach.
There is plenty of worthy competition out there, however. Look at the landscape. Brocade has data center switching and storage switching (including CNAs and HBAs) and they can own the network end-to-end. That puts Brocade in a position of delivering an end-to-end data center networking line that is tightly integrated. HP OEMs their SAN switches and CNA/HBAs, but their integration points to the server-side of the equation, as well as the partnerships in SAN switching from Brocade and Cisco. This means HP has nice potential for providing robust data center solutions.
A lot is dependent on integration between H3C products and technologies and HP's server lines. Cisco, with UCS, offers a fully integrated data center package from server to SAN. While Juniper is the belle of the ball, they have to rely on partnerships with Dell and IBM to sell their equipment as part of an integrated data center package and they probably have to compete with Brocade and Cisco in those deals. Even so, Juniper only offers the data side. Others like Extreme and Force10 have less in the way of partnerships.
The next data center network you build is going to look awfully different than what you have today. The problem with a traditional three-tier architecture, as Miniman points out, is that you eventually run out of bandwidth at the uplinks even though available capacity is wasted, and you can't make good use of the network connecting virtual servers and storage. Multi-pathing is going to make the single-tree network go away. Greg Ferro has a concise discussion on the capacity issue and what multi-pathing does to alleviate it. Essentially, a flattened layer two topology that you get with multi-path shifts north-south (uplink/downlink) traffic to east-west (cross connect) traffic, which reduces load north-south and increases load east-west. In addition, you can use the full capacity of the network.
