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Cisco is warning customers that some models of its blade servers could “overheat and emit a short flash” which would not only shock the poor IT person, but indicate the server has been fried.
Cisco’s “field notice” lists a bunch of Cisco’s UCS products as being affected, although Cisco didn’t disclose how many actual units or how many actual customers are at risk. The company contacted us to tell us that two customers reported problems.
However, Cisco did say earlier this month that it now had 10,000 UCS customers. It sold about $900 million worth of blade servers in 2011, it said, and holds the No. 3 market share position in blade servers behind HP and IBM, according to IDC.
Interestingly, Cisco first discovered the problem in July and issued its “field notice” warning at that time. It determined that a change to the blade server’s firmware would fix the problem. But after it did that, low and behold that didn’t fix all models. Another server was found to have spectacularly overheated so the company decided it would swap out the hardware for this model of server, known with the lovely name of B440.
Cisco is contacting customers of that product and replacing the faulty hardware with stuff that presumably isn’t so hot.
In a completely unrelated incident, HP recently recalled about a million fax machines because of a defect that could make them overheat and catch fire.