Cisco's vision for the virtual data center

Cisco has a vision for the so-called virtual data-center and is executing with products that automatically provision, manage and optimize virtualized environments, reports a story from Network World's New Data Center special issue. Cisco has been ramping up technology geared toward pulling together server, storage and network capacity needed to meet an application's demand. The approach is, not surprisingly, network centric, as opposed to server centric, or even (oh my!) having the application shoulder the burden of its performance itself. Still, the underlying premise makes sense. Since the network touches everything, perhaps it is the ideal place for the virtual environment to be orchestrated. The story says:

Cisco's vision has manifested itself thus far in its VFrame Data Center appliance. With the appliance, an enterprise could make many server resources appear as one large, virtual pool and stitch together the needed components to deliver a service across a virtual infrastructure. ... VFrame is an ambitious effort to reduce the complexity associated with provisioning and configuring virtual servers by leveraging a model-based paradigm and virtualizing the I/O interfaces," says Cameron Haight, research vice president at Gartner. "It's too early to tell if the VFrame approach is the right way to go or not, but the need for something like this, which automates configuration-related activities across dependent infrastructure-technology elements, is pretty clear," he says.

Have you played with VFrame yet? If so, what do you think of it?