Grid Meter » Cisco: Intelligence in the Network ... AND the Datacenter

September 28, 2005 | Comments: (0)

Cisco: Intelligence in the Network ... AND the Datacenter

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The way the IT publishers tend to cover the industry is to draw a neat little line separating network management from systems management. If you're a network admin, you're supposed to read Network World, Network Computing, Light Reading, etc. If you're a systems admin, you're supposed to read InfoWorld, Computerworld, eWeek, Informationweek, etc. While it does make sense for professionals to specialize in certain areas ... what's interesting about enterprise IT today is this artificial "boundary" between the two worlds.

But when the networking world's biggest player, Cisco, announces new product lines for datacenter virtualization (as they did today) -- it's painfully clear how vulnerable that line is between network and systems management.

It was well-publicized when Cisco acquired Infiniband provider Topspin for >$200 million earlier this year. Infiniband is a very fast, very high throughput (I/O) interconnect for server clustering in datacenters ... and has implications for Grid computing as well. If you want to learn about how it compares to other interconnect technologies like Ethernet and Myrinet, check out this white paper.

But Cisco's greater datacenter virtualization play is more profound than just interconnect fabric between servers (not to say that Infiniband isn't interesting though). It's about networking products that are more "application aware," and more sophisticated provisioning of storage and network resources (the VFrame management software "gives a single interface to provision Cisco data center infrastructure rather than addressing each Cisco product and technology individually," according to the release).

It's too early to gauge exactly where this is all headed, but it is clear that Cisco is carving out networking's space in systems management -- and really the sky's the limit. And as they say, imitation is the highest form of flattery -- it's a certainty that "datacenter virtualization" will be creeping into many other networking players' boilerplates in the near future.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on September 28, 2005 09:20 AM

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