Today Cisco made a serious push in the datacenter hardware market, introducing its first ‘datacenter in a shipping container’ offering. This move represents a huge leap for the networking giant, who has now intensified its competition with one-stop-shop datacenter providers HP, Dell, and IBM.

Cisco’s offering supports 16 racks with up to 25kW of power to each rack, and features a new approach to cooling.

“This first generation container offers only water-cooling, fully enclosed in each rack, which Cisco is claiming is unique in being installed through the bottom of the container, limiting the possibility of water from overhead chiller leaks damaging computing equipment.”

Each rack comes with a control that optimizes its cooling and integrates with the container management system software, and such a unit is able to deliver PUE of1.25 or less, which is considered excellent energy efficiency.        Nevertheless, ZDNet’s David Chernicoff rated it as a “me too” offering only meant to establish a presence in the market rather than a more significant position. The in-rack cooling concept is an original one, yet it may not be enough to generate the first generation of Cisco datacenter containers a desirable market share.

Cisco executives noted that the offering will be followed by enhanced generation products.

In addition to introducing a new offering, Cisco just extended its international reach by entering an agreement with Italian telecommunication company Tiscali. Cisco will now provide the company  with its UCS systems and Nexus switches.

Earlier, the company announced it is now offering early retirement plans for its U.S and Canada-based employees. This news comes shortly after the company dismissed 2 executives. Former security vice president of engineering and operations Nawaf Bitar now works at Juniper, and  Debra Chrapaty, previously SVP and general management of Cisco’s collaboration business now serves as CIO at Zynga.