Cisco looks to accelerate virtualization deployments

The company is playing up the numerous benefits customers can enjoy from virtualizing their datacenters

Cisco is looking to accelerate the rate at which customers adopt and implement virtualization in their datacenters, company officials said at a Cisco customer event this week.

Demand for virtualized datacenters is high, they said, due to the complexity of managing and provisioning physical resources, securing that environment, maximizing utilization of assets, numerous network connections, and the rising costs of facilities and energy usage.

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"Power is increasing at a faster rate than the top line revenue of your company," said John McCool, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's datacenter, switching, and services group. McCool spoke at the Cisco Live conference in San Francisco.

Virtualization removes the logical view of an infrastructure from the physical underpinnings, thus making datacenter resources transparent to an application and enabling that application to move, McCool said. Cisco itself was faced with a "$100 million server" issue -- it needed the server but didn't have enough room for it in a current datacenter and faced an expensive build out of a new facility just to house it.

But virtualization let Cisco pocket that stash. Virtualizing its datacenters reduced its cable plant by 4,800 cables, McCool said, made room for 50 percent more physical servers, and increased virtual machine capacity fourfold.

In another example, a New Jersey financial institution opening an office in Bangalore opted to host applications in New Jersey and implement virtual desktops in India with Cisco's Wide Area Application Services and Application Control Engine products to save money, McCool said.

But virtualization makes the mobile VM difficult to monitor and track, he said, and thus hard to manage. That's why Cisco developed VN-Link, software that allows the network to become VM-aware and map policies to a VM as it moves across physical ports.

VN-Link is intended to provide full visibility to VMs for the network administrator and VM management for the systems administrator, says Ed Bugnion, Cisco's CTO for the server access and virtualization business unit.

VN-Link is integral to Cisco's Nexus 2148T fabric extender to provide network interface virtualization, which provides a "direct, consistent view of VMs and the (datacenter) operational model" by divorcing VMs from their physical interfaces.

This, combined with a unified switching fabric supporting Ethernet and Fibre Channel, simplifies and provides greater and more consistent visibility into all datacenter operations, Bugnion said. The environment can be managed from a network perspective or from a server perspective, he said.

Cisco's platform for enabling all of this, of course, is the Unified Computing System. UCS is intended to be a single point of datacenter management through its ability to discover, view and configure resources, such as servers, and apply and enforce service profiles on those servers.

"Our strategy (with UCS) is to accelerate virtualization through increased visibility and control," Bugnion said. "We're focused on that part of the data center in which the network plays a central role. Management and energy efficiency is not an afterthought."

To date, Savvis and Thomson Reuters are two publicly announced potential customers for UCS. They note significant results from using or trialing virtualization and UCS.