At the recent Networkers at Cisco Live 2007, Cisco announced a broad array of innovative new data center products and solutions that it claims, will enable customers to better utilize their data center resources, deploy more robust business continuance, build cost-effective storage area networks, and enhance data security. In addition, at a press conference, the company announced its vision for next-generation data centers, called Data Center 3.0. The Cisco vision for Data Center 3.0 entails the real-time, dynamic orchestration of infrastructure services from shared pools of virtualized server, storage and network resources, while optimizing application performance, service levels, efficiency and collaboration.
"Cisco's success is built on listening to our customers and partners, and on understanding market transitions," said John Chambers, chairman and CEO, Cisco. "Because the network is uniquely positioned to be the platform for the data center, we are investing in innovations to help our customers transform their data centers for improved efficiency and increased business productivity."
Over the next 24 months, Cisco will deliver innovative new products, programs, and capabilities to help customers realize the Cisco Data Center 3.0 vision. New products and programs announced include the Cisco VFrame Data Center.
The VFrame Data Center (VFrame DC) is an orchestration platform that leverages network intelligence to provision resources together as virtualized services. This industry-first approach greatly reduces application deployment times, improves overall resource utilization, and offers greater business agility. Further, VFrame DC includes an open API, and easily integrates with third party management applications, as well as best-of-breed server and storage virtualization offerings.
With VFrame DC, customers can now link their compute, networking and storage infrastructures together as a set of virtualized services. This services approach provides a simple yet powerful way to quickly view all the services configured at the application level to improve troubleshooting and change management. VFrame DC offers a policy engine for automating resource changes in response to infrastructure outages and performance changes. Additionally, these changes can be controlled by external monitoring systems via integration with the VFrame DC web services application programming interface (API).
Additional information and resources on the Cisco data center vision and products announced can be found at http://newsroom.cisco.com/networkersUS/2007/