Cisco sets course for Data Centre 3.0

Vendor wants to turn infrastructure into a service

Cisco has started to unify its network application services into a new enterprise data centre platform, promising increased server utilisation. 

The vendor's Data Centre 3.0 vision spans existing products that Cisco has moved to the network over the past few years, such as security and storage area networks, as well as a series of new products.

Cisco considers the mainframe era as data centre 1.0, and the current client-server model as data centre 2.0. Data centre 3.0 combines the company's ideas for using the network to manage data with the rise of virtualisation technology.

Cisco chief executive John Chambers described Data Center 3.0 in his opening keynote at the Networkers at Cisco conference in Anaheim, California as "moving from a box mentality to an architecture mentality". 

The firm unveiled its VFrame Data Center which offers orchestration services at a network level. The application is able to identify when a service or application suffers from peak demand and dynamically add additional server resources.

It will also provision new systems, including the installation of the operating system, middleware and applications.

Cisco also released several other products under the Data Centre 3.0 banner, including the Transted Wan optimisation software, which encrypts key data on the network to ensure integrity, and an XML gateway for securing web services.

Chambers boasted that Data Centre 3.0 will lay the foundation for new services and technology that will drive a new wave of business efficiencies and revenue growth.

By enabling collaboration across departments and between companies, these innovations will dwarf the economic growth achieved during the first wave of internet adoption during the 1990s, Chambers projected.

• A video on Cisco's Data Centre 3.0 is available on vnunet.com TV

Referring to the increased communications as the true web 2.0, Chambers dismissed the consumer focused interpretation of web 2.0 as child's play.

"The next wave of productivity is not about personalisation, it is about collaboration," Chambers told delegates.

"Collaboration is nothing more than working together towards a common set of goals. Web 2.0 enables communication."

Cisco will further build out its portfolio of Data Centre 3.0 products. The company is preparing products in areas such as unified input/output, unified network fabric, self diagnosis and maintenance, file virtualisation and virtual machine integration.

Company executives declined to provide further information on future products.

Lucinda Borovick, a director for data centre networks at analyst firm IDC, considers the move a "big plunge" as Cisco is seeking to expand beyond its traditional stronghold in routing and switching for campus networks.

Firms today are using server virtualisation primarily for server consolidation. The technology's big promise, however, is in moving around applications and workloads fully automated to meet peak demands and increase server utilisation.

Current utilisation rates hover between 10 and 25 per cent, but Cisco is aiming for 50 to 80 per cent.

"Cisco has laid out a vision for where it wants to play," Borovick told vnunet.com. "It is doing infrastructure as a service: IT delivering infrastructure which then can be translated into a service."

Even though Cisco is talking more about virtualisation, the firm does not plan to create its own virtualisation software and will support any mainstream virtualisation platform such as Xen and VMware.

The company is also providing an application programming interface that allows third-party management applications, such as Opsware, a company that HP acquired earlier this week.

• A video on Cisco's Data Centre 3.0 is available on vnunet.com TV