Cisco isn’t happy with just being the data center and Internet networking big dog. The company now wants, with its Unified Computing System, to be the data center alpha dog. Cisco will be producing its own high-end 64-bit blade servers with Intel Nehalem processors, which will be powered by VMware, Windows Server 2008, and, pay attention now, Red Hat’s RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux).

In all the excitement over Cisco taking on HP, Dell and IBM in the server space, people seem to have missed that Linux is part of Cisco’s plan. Novell and Red Hat are both partners. While I still don’t know what part Novell will be playing, Red Hat was more than happy to tell me what they’ll be doing.

Mike Evans, Red Hat’s VP of Corporate Development told me that Red Hat and Cisco have been working on bringing RHEL 5 to the UCS (Unified Computing System) for over nine-months. So, when Cisco starts shipping its first servers, RHEL will be ready to run on them.

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