Cisco preps for virtualized 'Data Center 3.0'
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3.0 already? Better toss the 2.0 rubbish Virtualization has become somewhat of a Wild West for the data center market, promising streets paved with gold for IT groups - and endless riches for the vendors hawking this new-age server slicing technology.â¦
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SANTA CLARA, CALIFORNIA - Cisco SystemsÂ took dead aim at data centers Tuesday at its annual Worldwide Analyst Conference, with company executives claiming many communications functions in servers would be better off moved into the network.
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Updated guidelines make clearer how to use Windows Server with third-party virtualization tools including VMware -- but that will all likely change before too long.
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Cisco Systems(R) (NASDAQ:CSCO) today announced it has made enhancements to its Internet Protocol Next-Generation Network (IP NGN) architecture to ease deployment of a wide range of business-focused and consumer-based services.
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Cisco has released a new line of switches and services for small and medium sized businesses aimed at helping companies with 100 to 1000 employees deploy converged voice
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BCN Systems&#39; routing architecture will be used to to speed development of converged networks for data, voice, and video. By Networking Pipeline News.
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Cisco has created a 3D virtual marketplace to help its channel partners work with application providers and manufacturers worldwide.
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Networking giant Cisco Systems Inc. have announced plans to open a new research and development center in Tokyo next year. The company will invest a cool $12 million in the project over five years.
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Cisco Systems plans to introduce a network switch that will increase traffic capacity to 15 trillion bits of data a second.
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Tomorrow Cisco Systems Inc. will announce an upgrade to its small business and branch office line of routers, incorporating more processing speed and a raft of new features.
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SEPTEMBER 13, 2004  - Cisco Systems Inc. tomorrow plans to announce an all-new line of branch-office routers that integrate basic routing capabilities with IP voice support, security tools and other functionality.
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It&#39;s hard to overstate how important the&#160;Nexus data-center switching platform, set to be unveiled Monday, is to Cisco Systems: for the dominant networking vendor&#39;s enterprise business, it&#39;s the biggest thing since the Catalyst 6000, which made its debut in 1999, according to the two key executives on the project.At a dinner with press last week, they compared it to the CRS-1 (Carrier Routing System), a huge switch for the core of carrier networks that Cisco rolled out in 2004. To bring that platform to life, the company developed a new version of its flagship IOS (Internetworking Operating System) software and engineered the hardware to scale up to 92Tbps of throughput. The core of the Internet is Cisco&#39;s turf, and it wasn&#39;t willing to give any ground to upstarts.The Nexus brings Cisco into not just a new territory for its business, but a new product category: a unified switch that spans storage and computing in datacenters and has security built in. Given the stakes, superlatives are natural.-- A single Nexus chassis will be able to handle more than 15Tbps of traffic ripping through a data center, up from just 2Tbps for a current Catalyst 6500 switch.-- At that rate, the switch could run 5 million concurrent transcontinental conferencing sessions using Cisco&#39;s TelePresence Collaboration system. It could also copy the entire searchable Internet in 7.5 minutes.-- One interface module for the Nexus 7000 chassis will come with 32 10Gbps ports, and the platform is designed to support future interfaces including 100Gbps.-- The company spent about $250 million on research and development for the new platform, and at its peak, the Nexus R&amp;D team numbered more than 500 engineers, according to Tom Edsall, senior vice president and chief technology officer of Cisco&#39;s Data Center Business Unit.As with the Catalyst 6000 Series and the CRS-1, Cisco developed the Nexus with an eye to long-term needs. Where the CRS marked the debut of IOS XR, the first modular version of IOS, the Nexus will have Cisco&#39;s first OS that can be fully virtualized, called NX-OS. The Nexus will also break new ground with its lossless switching fabric, a departure from traditional Ethernet -- though backward compatible with it, Cisco said.The system also represents a gamble on FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet), a still-emerging standard for sending traditional Fibre Channel storage network traffic over Ethernet. Though the new standard will probably succeed with the backing of Cisco and other big vendors, the installed base of Fibre Channel is huge, said Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala. There will be a proving period for Ethernet as a reliable, lossless datacenter transport, he said.Cisco expects the uptake of the new platform to take time, just as it did with the CRS. The first Nexus product will go on sale in the second quarter of this year, and in the first year Cisco expects to see mostly trials of the new system, said Jayshree Ullal, senior vice president of Cisco&#39;s datacenter group. Deployments will probably start to pick up in the second, third and fourth years after the introduction, she said.But just as the opportunity was huge for the CRS, as video and other traffic rose fast on carrier networks, the chance to capture next-generation datacenters is likely to justify Cisco&#39;s efforts on the Nexus line. Web-based services and applications, as well as outsourced computing offerings from Amazon.com and other companies, are powering the growth of massive data centers. Microsoft&#39;s MSN division is a test customer of the Nexus, said Ullal. Asked whether the mighty Google would buy in as well, Ullal said, &quot;I would hope so.&quot;
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(InfoWorld) - Managing transportation logistics is all about handling scale. As transportation management services firm Transplace added consumer goods companies such as Del Monte, Office Depot, Home Depot, Auto Zone, and DirecTV as customers, it needed to quickly bring server capacity online. Already planning a hardware refresh to support continued growth, CTO Vince Biddlecomb decided to bring in server virtualization at the same time so that he'd have a more scalable, flexible platform for that anticipated growth. Biddlecomb uses EMC VMware on his Sun servers mainly to support Oracle databases and J2EE applications on BEA's WebLogic Web server. He liked the fact that the technology was operating system- and hardware-agnostic, as his datacenter supports a range of technologies. And he found the virtualization approach to be less complex than, for example, running his Oracle databases on an IBM Power6-based System p 570 server, which he had considered initially. "We have all 12 instances sit on two logical partitions. We can configure the CPU and memory for each, and share when they are not busy," Biddlecomb says. But adopting virtualization required a deeper investment in datacenter hardware, Biddlecomb discovered, because virtualization changes the fundamental character of what is being supported. "You look at it as a pool of memory and CPUs. You just drop a couple VMs to increase capacity," he says. But treating servers as instances of capacity from a large pool of resources means that pool has to be kept available and running well. To do so, Biddlecomb discovered he needed to beef up the network I/O capabilities of the physical servers to avoid network traffic contention across the VMs sharing those ports. "We put more NICs in to them, since there is more network activity going on," he says. He also discovered he needed to beef up his SAN storage to support all the VMs that began to be created and to provide sufficient failover capacity in case of failure. "You can very quickly suck up 500GB or 1TB of storage for the VMs," Biddlecomb says. Although you no longer need storage in the servers themselves, you need more storage in the SAN, and that storage tends to be costlier. The more fine-grained your servers, the more storage you need, Biddlecomb notes. He likes to have more, smaller virtual servers so that each has a specific purpose that lets it be added or deleted easily without worrying about other applications that could be affected. But with 20GB of overhead for each virtual server, that approach can quickly eat up storage. Altogether, the use of virtualization roughly doubles the cost of a physical server, Biddlecomb says. He spends about $12,000 for a Dell server with extra NICs, plus $6,000 for VMware, and $5,000 for the associated enterprise storage. Because he had already planned to replace all his servers, there was no additional sticker shock from the fact that all physical servers needed CPUs from the same family, but most enterprises would require a complete server refresh. "You need to commit to building that infrastructure," he says. Biddlecomb also notes that the CPU-family restriction will limit how he can deploy virtualization in the future, and force him to forgo incremental technology improvements until the next server refresh. He's already been forced to do so: "We'll stick with our Intel servers even though the AMD [Barcelona-class Opteron] servers look to be better for memory management." One way he will work around that limitation in the future is to put physical servers into one of two clusters, one inside the DMZ and one outside. That way, he can stage his hardware refreshes by cluster, rather than do everything at once. Ultimately, Biddlecomb sees the use of virtualization as cost-neutral when it comes to the hardware side. "But you get a large savings in administration," he says. He has about 120 virtual servers spread out over 30 servers, administered by just two people. Virtualization special report Case study: Credit Suisse Case study: Nationwide Insurance Case study: Purdue University Case study: Stonebridge Bank
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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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SAN JOSE, Calif. _ Just days after Cisco System
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Cisco launched a virtual world that it hopes will encourage resellers to meet with application developers to exchange information that helps provide products to Cisco customers.
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(Source: MessageLabs)Administrators struggle with ever increasing complexity in the data center. Join Brian Babineau, Enterprise Strategy Group and Anne O'Neill, Symantec Corporation for an evaluation of these options and the discussion of Veritas Server Foundation from Symantec, a novel approach to Data Center Automation that embodies Symantec's vision for a solution to DCA that is both complete and simple. We invite you to register now for full access to this online broadcast.