Cisco: Networks will consolidate and servers disaggregate

There are some interesting crumbs dropped by Cisco execs in the company's data center blog that describes where Cisco believes the data center is headed. To support new applications such as those presented by Google's Chrome browser and Google Gears, along with the movement of applications away from traditional PCs to mobile devices, Omar Sultan writes that the back end infrastructure will be virtualized and processes would be automated. Meanwhile, Doug Gourlay believes that "networks will consolidate and servers disaggregate."

In his blog post, Gourlay describes seven trends he believes will happen in the data center that ultimately point to a stronger integration between the hypervisor and the network.

He writes:

... imagine a data center with one network, connecting all resources, that understands the virtual machine and enabled VM mobility.  Then imagine racks of servers with central pools of RAM, and centralized storage systems that are synchronously replicated between multiple facilities.  Now the role of the hypervisor gets very very interesting… gathering pools of resources and abstracting the physical manifestations of workload processing resources and presenting them to the Guest OSs on an as needed and true on-demand model. 

Cisco wants to own the networking fabric that enables virtualized and cloud computing. But what are the implications of that for the customer? Is Cisco the only networking company that can deliver robust products for this era or are there point products coming through that could do a better job?

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