In July, Cisco executives for the first time publically discussed the company’s strategy in positioning itself in a market disrupted by virtualisation and cloud computing.

The company’s CTO, Padmasree Warrior, outlined the strategy.

Cisco’s definition of cloud computing is “a way to separate IT resources and services from the infrastructure in a way that can be delivered on demand, at scale and in a multitenant environment,” Warrior said.

“We know the industry is ripe for change – firms are looking for better ways to improve efficiency, improve the return on the spending, and so on.” For data centers, the change will come in the form of a transition to highly virtualised facilities.

“Our strategy at Cisco is to enable that transition.”

In gearing its products and services to help data centers cope with the soon-to-be unavoidable shift to the new model, Cisco is sensitive about forcing existing facilities to make too many changes in the way they are already designed.

KNOWN RELIABILITY
“There are certain clear advantages in today’s data centers,” Warrior said. “Today’s data centers are secure; they are reliable; they are trusted; they provide control that is critical for large enterprises. A lot of them, frankly, have already made the investments, so they are not looking for some magical new technology or new architecture to come along and make obsolete the investments they make today.”

Cisco intends to help today’s data centers “carve an evolutionary path” to the cloud model using assets already on hand.

The company will be playing in three of the four layers on which the cloud rests and which make up the cloud marketplace. Those four layers are software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), IT as a service (ITaaS) and the physical IT infrastructure that supports the upper three layers. All are delivered on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Cisco plans to continue playing in the SaaS space, WebEx being the testament to that tactic. It will further extend its reach into the PaaS layer, continuing to deliver software-development frameworks and components. It will press on in the bottom physical infrastructure (or foundation) layer, while avoiding ITaaS that sits directly above. Companies in the ITaaS layer provide compute resources such as storage and bandwidth as a service.

Out of the four layers, the SaaS and the foundation layer are the biggest two and Cisco intends to make aggressive plays there as the cloud evolves.

The company sees evolution of cloud computing unfolding in four phases.

The first phase is complete – investment in standalone data centers. The second phase is unfolding right now, as companies across the world are developing public cloud services, such as the ones Amazon, Microsoft, Google and ElasticHosts provide.

As enterprises continue developing internal – or private – clouds, cloud computing will move into the third phase. In that phase, enterprises small and large will be deploying a combination of private and public clouds.

Cisco’s vision of the final phase – at which point the cloud will be fully evolved – is an “Intercloud” – an ecosystem of clouds resembling the internet.

PHASED TRANSITION
Transition from the traditional data center model to a private cloud will unfold in phases as well, said Warrior.

As with evolution of cloud computing as a whole, the first phase of this transition is already complete – consolidation of IT resources and subsequent cost containment.

Unified fabric is the second phase. Warrior explained it as developing “the capability of extending data center technologies with virtualisation to server, storage, networking and applications”.

A data center steps into the third phase when it deploys unified computing, such as the set of solutions Cisco unrolled earlier this year. Launching the Unified Computing System was the company’s first step in implementing its strategy of helping data centers shift to a highly virtualised environment.

“The reason we are interested in this architectural shift is that if you look back towards all of the compute architectures, then perhaps this virtualised, distributed cloud architecture is the most network-centric of all the architectural shifts we have seen,” Warrior said.

Companies will be able to take full advantage of the cloud’s on-demand flexibility at scale only when intercloud workload portability is possible. “To do that you need the network to play a central role.”

This article first appeared DatacenterDynamicsFOCUS Magazine
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