Cisco, IBM team on servers

Cisco and IBM announced last week co-developed products that will improve the management and performance of data center servers and network infrastructure equipment.

Cisco developed switch hardware for IBM's BladeCenter products that will help improve traffic flows inside blade server chassis, the companies say. Integration of IBM server and storage provisioning software with Cisco Catalyst 6500 LAN switches and MDS 9000 storage-area network switches will let users operate data center network and computing infrastructure as one system.

Cisco's Intelligent Gigabit Ethernet Switch Module (IGESM) is a hardware device that fits into IBM's eServer BladeCenter chassis. IGESM provides Gigabit Ethernet switching, quality-of-service traffic management and load balancing among server nodes deployed in an IBM blade server. Cisco's device will compete with Layer 2 to Layer 7 switch gear announced last year by Nortel, which is available for IBM and HP blade server products. The IGESM module, which can be controlled with BladeCenter's management software, is scheduled to be available this month and will cost $5,000.

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Cisco and IBM announced last week co-developed products that will improve the management and performance of data center servers and network infrastructure equipment.

Cisco developed switch hardware for IBM's BladeCenter products that will help improve traffic flows inside blade server chassis, the companies say. Integration of IBM server and storage provisioning software with Cisco Catalyst 6500 LAN switches and MDS 9000 storage-area network switches will let users operate data center network and computing infrastructure as one system.

Cisco's Intelligent Gigabit Ethernet Switch Module (IGESM) is a hardware device that fits into IBM's eServer BladeCenter chassis. IGESM provides Gigabit Ethernet switching, quality-of-service traffic management and load balancing among server nodes deployed in an IBM blade server. Cisco's device will compete with Layer 2 to Layer 7 switch gear announced last year by Nortel, which is available for IBM and HP blade server products. The IGESM module, which can be controlled with BladeCenter's management software, is scheduled to be available this month and will cost $5,000.

Cisco and IBM also have integrated their respective data center switch and server management software to allow for better communication between servers and switches. The Server Application State Protocol is a new communications protocol created by the vendors that lets a Cisco Content Switching Module inside a Catalyst 6500 switch receive server health and availability data directly from IBM's Enterprise Workload Manager software. These integrated products will enable applications hosted in data centers to run faster and to better survive network or server failures.

IBM also has added Cisco-specific hardware-provisioning features to some of its Tivoli management software products. The Tivoli Provisioning Manager now can be used to configure settings on Cisco Catalyst 6500 switches (including firewall and Secure Sockets Layer modules for the switch), the IGESM and the MDS 9000 storage-area network (SAN) switch. These additions could allow data center network administrators to control server and network infrastructure from a single application view.

Tivoli SAN Manager software also will be able to work with Cisco's MDS 9000 switch to manage virtual SAN deployments. The Tivoli software will act as a master control for setting up virtual SANs, by configuring Cisco SAN switch hardware in concert with IBM's TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller software.

Read more about data center in Network World's Data Center section.