Cisco comes under more data center fire
BLADE, switch buddy to the server stars, unveils fabric architecture
By Jim Duffy on Fri, 02/05/10 - 9:18pm.More shots are being fired at Cisco in the data center. BLADE Network Technologies, perhaps Cisco's closest competitor in data center switching, this week unveiled its Unified Fabric Architecture, which stresses the company's sole focus on the data center and its partnerships with server vendors.
Cisco, as we all know, is in virtually every market - including data center - where networking is integral. Many critics, including BLADE, have charged that Cisco is in too many markets to specialize in just one, and has retrofitted and repackaged gear initially built for enterprise workgroups and campuses for more demanding applications - like data center and service provider networks.
Meanwhile, BLADE claims its switches have and always will be purpose-built for data center applications. It also has some musclebound data center partners, like server vendors IBM and HP, and Cisco rival Juniper. Cisco aliented its server partners by unveiling a blade server of its own last year.
With that, BLADE introduced its Unified Fabric Architecture (UFA) this week. UFA includes extensions to the BLADEOS operating system, which the company says is installed in 9,500 enterprises around the world, including 350 of the Fortune 500. The extensions to BLADEOS include network virtualization enhancements, called VMready, that optimizes the operating system for "hypervisor agnostic" server virtualization. VMready ships standard with every 10G Ethernet blade switch from BLADE.
Another extension to BLADEOS is vNIC. vNIC allows customers to converge their LAN, SAN and management networks onto a single wire, BLADE says, and supports mainframes, rack optimized servers, tower systems and purpose-built application appliances from multiple vendors.
Other components of UFA are BLADE's server control software for environmental, configuration, I/O and provisioning management of blade servers; FabricHarmony element manager, which can be integrated with IBM Tivoli, HP OpenView, CA UniCenter, HP OpsWare, and IBM Director; and the 3 million hour mean time between failure of BLADE's data center fabric elements.
The company says it is also working to enhance the performance of its fabric products for 40/100G Ethernet applications, and extend the scalability of its fabric through a proprietary protocol it calls the Distributed Fabric Protocol.
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