Nuova Systems

Dec 14, 2011

The science behind why you shouldn't pop your pimples A key person responsible for creating Cisco's billion dollar server business has left the company: David Lawler. Lawler's next move is unknown and his departure has been kept quiet, too. He left to spend more time with his family, a Cisco spokesperson said. But his bio still appears on the Cisco website, and his LinkedIn profile still proclaims he's employed there as vice president of the Unified Computing System Server Access Virtualization Business Unit. Lawler came to Cisco when Cisco bought Nuova Systems, a start-up Cisco funded and then later fully acquired back in 2008. The Nuova team developed Cisco's Unified Computing System Server (UCS). This server was unique in the industry at the time because it combined a server with networking technology, storage technology from EMC , and so-called virtualization software from VMware (virtualization software tricks applications into thinking they are on their own servers, even though they are sharing one with many others). It also pitted Cisco as a direct competitor to its biggest reseller at the time, Hewlett-Packard. This kicked off an intense rivalry between the two companies that is still burning strong today. HP responded to UCS by beefing up its own network gear division, ProCurve, and trying to undercut Cisco's prices and steal away its resellers. Lawler was instrumental in creating UCS because he had prior experience building a successful server business -- experience Cisco sorely lacked. Lawler had served as an executive at Sun Microsystems and built Sun’s rack mount server product lines into a billion dollar business. Lawler's work helped Sun lead the Internet server market in the late 1990s. This type of server was a precursor to the type of technology used by UCS. Other key players of Cisco's original UCS team like Nuova cofounder Soni Jiandani and vice president of engineering Satinder Sethi are still around. If you've got the skinny on executives leaving or joining Cisco or other big tech firms, let us know. jbort@businessinsider.com or on Twitter @Julie188 .