It's been a not-very-well-kept "secret" for years that the world's No. 1 IT networking company has wanted to shed its image of being the pipefitter for the Internet and delve into the business of what really makes the new-generation data center work. It has the money, the talent, the installed base and the leadershipwhy not?March 16, 2009,
stands to be a pretty big day in the long, successful history of Cisco Systems.
It's been a not-very-well-kept "secret" for years that the world's
No. 1 networking company has wanted to shed the image of being the pipefitter
for the Internet and delve deeper into what really makes the new-generation
data center work.
Servers. Storage arrays. Virtualized operating systems, applications and
storage. Speedy I/O constructs. Business analytics and aggregated intelligence.
They all need ultrafast networking, and many of those things are already in the
Cisco product line or about to join it.
Cisco wants IT administrators to do what Apple Computer said a few years ago,
to "think different." That is to "boot up" their
systems from the network. It aims to add system intelligence and virtualization
capabilities right into the network infrastructure in order to add a magnitude
of efficiencyand to save power at the same time.
Cisco and its charismatic and respected CEO,
John Chambers, have been working toward this day for a long, long time. The
clues have been coming down the pike for an equal measure of time.
Two years ago at the VMWorld conference in San Francisco,
Chambers took the unusual step for a keynote address of promoting his own
company's virtualization offering, VFrame
Data Center
appliance, which is, in effect, Cisco's data center operating system. But given
VMware's dominating presence at the conference, Chambers cast the speech so as
to highlight the importance of "network" virtualization.
You just knew he wanted to talk about all virtualization in the data center,
but it wasn't his place at the time. He certainly could have; after all, Cisco
is a part owner of VMware.
In September 2007, eWEEK's ace networking writer Paula
Musich interviewed Jayshree Ullal, Cisco's senior vice president of data
center, switching and security technology, about how the company expected this
long-range strategy to play out.
For its strategy to work, Musich wrote, "Cisco has to gain the confidence
of a totally new audience and entice them to accept its vision of orchestrating
and provisioning different resources to support the on-demand creation of
virtual machines." The first product instantiation of that vision, the
VFrame provisioning appliance, was launched at the end of July 2007 at Cisco's
Networkers user conference.
And the company has been aiming for March
16, 2009, ever since.
"The network is the ideal place to connect heterogeneous equipment [which
is the stuff of all data centers], and it is the natural place to scale and
manage all these different imagesbe they servers, apps or storage," Ullal
told Musich.
"To continue to add virtual capacity, configure downstream storage,
add/drop/delete, and maintain configurations, it requires a constant state. The
network is ideal for that. The radical approach to booting from the network and
providing a heterogeneous set of automated discovery management tools was
compelling," Ullal said.
The other thing Cisco realized was that the depth of VFrame comes also from the
number of devices it will have to support, Ullal said. In 2007, it was very
Cisco-centric; since then, the company has provided API
integration with VMware using SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) X M L APIs,
among many other APIs.
Cisco's Data Center 3.0 vision was to be a three- to five-year effort before
coming to fruition, said Ullal.
The centerpiece of that vision, the Cisco
VFrame Data Center
appliance, was designed to bring greater automation to the process of
provisioning the server, storage and network resources needed to bring new business
applications online.
Nearly two years later, ahead of schedule, Cisco apparently is ready to launch
a retooled VFrame along with a new home-developed server, and perhaps some
other products. We'll find out March 16.
"This is an architectural statement about how data centers need to be
retrofitted," Ullal said. "This is a journey, not a sprint."
With so many legacy data centers around the world originally outfitted in the
1980s and '90s ready to be refreshed to handle Web services and the increasing
demand of cloud computing, the time is right for a company to come into this
market from the networking perspective.
A new race against the conventional data center competitionIBM,
Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Sun Microsystems and dozens of other companiesis just
about to begin.
May the best companies win.
IT Infrastructure 
/ 8 
