Cisco Systems is reportedly considering offering customers a portable, container-based data center as part of its Unified Computing System (UCS).

"We're looking at a model of building a Cisco container - with a Cisco part number - that will contain the unified computing platform," said Bruce Klein, Cisco's US public sector senior VP, in an interview with Information Week.

Of course, Cisco would not be alone in offering the market container-based data centers, which are often useful in disaster recovery situations or when extra capacity is needed at short notice, or for a limited period of time.

Vendors such as HP, IBM, Bull, Dell, Sun, SGI (formerly Rackable Systems), plus Verari Systems, all offer their own portable container based data centers for example. Plus the fact of course that Cisco equipment, in one form or another, already appears in these vendors container products.

And according to Information Week, Cisco has long been selling pieces of containerised data centers to the military via systems integrators. Indeed, the US military recently ordered 150 containerised data centers loaded with Cisco equipment, for deployment in war zones overseas.

However, as the networking giant is now offering its own servers, it now has all the ingredients to begin offering its own container-based data center. Indeed, Cisco has posted a product brochure for what it calls the Cisco Containerized Data Center on its Web site.

The NaviSite CEO also announced the first customer win for NaviSite's new fully managed services offering. The unnamed client is a large international insurance provider.