Every once in a while a subtle evolutionary change occurs that dramatically affects the future of networking. As IT is making a dramatic transition to an SOA, the networking industry has been hesitant to embrace and commit to the transition.

Early attempts by such vendors as Cisco to create unique application-oriented networking architectures have met with corporate resistance. The first real change of networking direction came from Alcatel-Lucent in the service provider market with the successful introduction of the concept of a Services Router.

Initially an aggressive marketing tactic to differentiate from the classic IP Router, the Services Router has recently evolved into a useful infrastructure tool to flatten over architected hierarchical IP Service Provider networks. The concept has become so successful that other vendors such as Juniper have recently released competitive products.

In the corporate environment, the evolution to services-centric networking was initially directed at WAN optimization of XML-based Web services application traffic flows. That technology is now universally accepted as a network/application optimization tactic. Stimulated by this success, vendors have begun to release products that are taking the next steps in the evolution to true services-centric networking.

Cisco has released its strategy for the transformation of the data center from what it believed were discrete silos for servers, storage, LAN, SAN, applications and security into an intelligent services-centric fabric. This fabric is based upon Service/File/Virtual Machine Virtualization, Adaptive Orchestration based upon Automated Provisioning of Physical/Virtualized Resources and Self-Diagnosis/Maintenance, Data Encryption/Migration, End-to-End Applications Monitoring and Unified I/O and Network Fabric/Transport. Cisco calls this concept Data Center 3.0.

Although a major step in the evolution of service-centric networking, there are major issues with this concept. The issues are, for the most part, philosophical/organizational in nature. Cisco’s definitions are not the same as the IT industry’s definitions within an SOA. There is no stated integration with Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), business process and applications development SOA-based software.