Cisco Launches VMware Data Center Provisioning
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Cisco has announced that it&#39;s integrating its VFrame Data Center with VMware Virtual Infrastructure. The networking company called it &quot;a key solution for the Cisco vision of next generation data centres, called Data Center 3.0&quot;.
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(InfoWorld) - Cisco Systems's Linksys division thinks SMBs should have some of the same features enterprises get, such as backup power and virtualization, when they attach storage to their networks. On Monday, the company rolled out its first NAS products for businesses, filling a need it found in smaller organizations when it started investigating the technology about two years ago, said Ivor Diedricks, a senior product marketing manager. The rollout includes two lines of NAS chassis, ranging in price from $999.99 to $2,499.99. NAS is common in enterprises and a fledgling category in consumer electronics, but neither of those types of gear suits enterprises with between five and 100 users, Diedricks said. The company's goal was to key capabilities of the large-enterprise systems into products that are affordable to SMBs. Linksys' well-known parent also serves some enterprises in that five-to-100-user range, Diedricks said. But those companies generally have an in-house IT staff and want a direct support relationship with Cisco, whereas Linksys customers generally turn to resellers for management and support. The NAS products are available with an optional redundant power supply unit to keep the NAS units running in case of a power outage as well as standard on-disk encryption, a system within the chassis for encrypting data. With on-disk encryption, disks can be taken out and moved, and the data will stay secure, Diedricks said. Linksys introduced four NSS (Network Storage System) chassis, each with four drive bays. The NSS6000 includes some advanced features that are not in the NSS4000, notably virtualization capability, Diedricks said. This feature lets a business organize more than one NAS chassis into a single virtual volume. An NSS4000 can be part of one of these virtual volumes, but the NSS6000 is required to run virtualization. Also, the NSS6000 can handle 75 simultaneous users, while the NSS4000 is limited to 15. Both the NSS4000 and NSS6000 also are available in versions that already include a set of 250GB RAID drives for a total capacity of 1TB. Also Monday, Linksys introduced its first stackable switches for SMBs. The devices are designed to help enterprises expand their networks as they grow. As many as eight can be stacked together and managed as one switch, and an optional redundant power supply can keep a stack of as many as six running in case of an outage. The switches range from a 24-port 10/100M bps device with four Gigabit Ethernet ports and two interfaces for fiber Gigabit links to an all-Gigabit Ethernet switch with four fiber interfaces and Power over Ethernet to run VoIP phones and other devices. They all have quality-of-service features to support VoIP. Estimated street prices range from $409.99 to $999.99.
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VMware, a maker of software that enables computers to run multiple operating systems simultaneously, is working on a new product to make it secure for corporations to open their networks to contractors or telecommuters.
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Cisco Systems Inc. of San Jose, Calif., Monday acquired privately held P-Cube Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif. P-Cube develops service control platforms, which help service providers
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Multimax, Inc. -- the premier resource for  performance-based enterprise information technology (IT) and  communications services for Department of Defense and civilian agencies --  announced today that it has achieved Advanced Unified Communications  Specialization under the Cisco Systems, Inc.
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Network equipment maker Cisco Systems  Inc  on Monday launched a new switching product aimed  at large data centers, and forecast strong sales despite  worries of a slowdown in U.S. technology spending.
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Brocade Communications Systems, Cisco, EMC, Network Appliance and, most recently, F5 Networks have all acquired file virtualization start-ups, suggesting that file virtualization is another technology getting close to prime time.
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Cisco Systems Inc. on Tuesday launched  a Web-based product to help businesses deliver live and  on-demand videos to large groups, in its latest push to expand  into the enterprise video market.
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Cisco Systems plans on Monday to introduce a network switch that will increase traffic capacity to 15 trillion bits of data a second.
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[Johannesburg, 15 December 2004] - Fujitsu and Cisco Systems have reached a fundamental agreement to enter into a strategic alliance focusing on routers and switches that will enable service providers and enterprises to build advanced Internet Protocol (IP
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SAP has decided to support virtual server installations.
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Network Appliance today introduced tools to manage backup and storage tasks for VMware virtual servers.
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'Data Center 3.0' initiative gets rolling Cisco is selling a new obscenely large switch, tapped as the lynchpin of its "Data Center 3.0" virtualization initiative the company has been gabbing about for monthsâ¦
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TechWeb - The upgrade helps manage virtualization technologies, SAN- and NAS-based storage resources, and network devices acting as routers, switches, firewalls, and load balancers.
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Data center management software pulls in more pieces of the infrastructure--virtual machines and virtual networks.
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Using its strengths in virtual machine technology, VMWare on Monday unwrapped new beta software for the desktop that allows administrators to more securely deploy and mange work environments outside the corporate network.
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(InfoWorld) - Like other adopters of server virtualization, Purdue University was concerned that its datacenter would hit the wall, exceeding physical space, power, and cooling limits. The use of EMC VMware let it combine 140 physical servers into three Hewlett-Packard DL-585 servers, a 40:1 compression ratio, says Mike Rubesch, director of IT infrastructure systems. "It helps postpone the inevitable," he adds. But the first servers chosen had very low utilization -- around 5 percent -- so the 40:1 rate is not sustainable. Over time, Rubesch expects the ratio to be 6:1, taking into account such servers as e-mail, database, and telephony that cannot be virtualized. That utilization rate will still reduce overall power usage to 16 percent of what it had been and physical space needs to a tenth, as the use of blade servers plus virtualization greatly reduces the physical footprint. Facilities costs should fall by $75,000 per year and hardware costs by $250,000 per year, he says. But organizations considering the use of virtualization need to be careful calculating costs, Rubesch cautions. If you have fewer than 10 virtual server instances running on a physical VMware server, virtualization becomes "extraordinarily expensive," he says. IT managers must also be careful not to factor in too much savings for the operating systems and applications running in virtual machines, Rubesch says. Many IT managers count on being able to run multiple instances of an OS or an app on one CPU, paying for just one license, because most enterprise apps are licensed on a per-CPU basis. But vendors are starting to charge per instance, not per CPU. For example, BEA now charges per instance rather than per CPU for its WebLogic server, and Microsoft Windows Server Enterprise Edition's license allows use on one physical server and as many as four VMs on that server. As virtualization grows more popular, you can expect the licensing savings to evaporate, so the investment should be based on savings elsewhere, such as in hardware and facilities efficiencies, Rubesch says. The use of VMs also increases your risk, because "you can put a lot of eggs in one basket," Rubesch says. But because you've reduced the number of points of failure, IT staff has more capability to focus on those critical areas, he notes. Rubesch is building sufficient capacity so that no single server is fully utilized, providing space for EMC's VMotion software to move VMs if a physical server fails. He's also keeping a spare physical server ready to go if needed. Using virtualization also incurs a high up-front cost. "The benefits aren't immediate," Rubesch says. A big reason is that to use the EMC VMotion utility to move server instances to other physical servers for better load-balancing or failover requires that all the hardware use the same CPU family, requiring a big hardware cost at each refresh cycle. "You need to sell that concept a little bit," he says dryly. Beyond the hardware costs, the use of virtualization makes the server environment more complicated, as "servers" can reside anywhere and change where they reside over time. As a result, "you need more skills," Rubesch says. For example, although a good Windows administrator will easily adapt to running virtualized Windows servers, you still need a dedicated person to handle such items as dynamic allocation and failover, he says. Of course, you can also use virtualization to simplify your environment, Rubesch notes, such as having standard server images that ensure consistency -- ending the nightmare of navigating the peculiarities specific to each hand-deployed physical server. "It's a lot simpler with VMs to have them nearly identical." Despite the caveats on understanding actual savings and the increased up-front costs, Rubesch is a big fan of server virtualization: "You get real benefit from it -- as long as you plan ahead." Virtualization special report Case study: Credit Suisse Case study: Nationwide Insurance Case study: Stonebridge Bank Case study: Transplace