Cisco eyes larger data center, IT services roles

SAN JOSE - Cisco last week insisted, in the face of some skepticism, that its products will be the key ingredient for businesses trying to virtualize IT services such as storage, processing, applications and security.

On the week of the company's 20th anniversary, executives at Cisco's worldwide analyst conference sounded more like the vendor's older siblings in enterprise IT - namely, HP and IBM. In outlining the company's strategy for corporate data center networks, executives freely tossed about buzzwords such as "virtualization," "on-demand" and "adaptive enterprise" - even giving credit to IBM and HP when doing so.

At issue is the question of where intelligence should reside in a virtualized infrastructure - on computers, or in the network itself, as Cisco believes. Cisco must avoid stepping on the toes of its channel and integration partners - including HP and IBM - as it eyes a bigger piece of the IT and network integration services pie, industry experts say.

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SAN JOSE - Cisco last week insisted, in the face of some skepticism, that its products will be the key ingredient for businesses trying to virtualize IT services such as storage, processing, applications and security.

On the week of the company's 20th anniversary, executives at Cisco's worldwide analyst conference sounded more like the vendor's older siblings in enterprise IT - namely, HP and IBM. In outlining the company's strategy for corporate data center networks, executives freely tossed about buzzwords such as "virtualization," "on-demand" and "adaptive enterprise" - even giving credit to IBM and HP when doing so.

At issue is the question of where intelligence should reside in a virtualized infrastructure - on computers, or in the network itself, as Cisco believes. Cisco must avoid stepping on the toes of its channel and integration partners - including HP and IBM - as it eyes a bigger piece of the IT and network integration services pie, industry experts say.

Cisco CEO John Chambers said the company is pushing to move more server-based services into networks.

"We're moving from just the transport of voice, video and data [over IP] to a virtualization of services" in data centers, Chambers said. "Ethernet is going to play a huge role in this evolution."

Cisco CTO Charlie Giancarlo and other technologists outlined methods Cisco is exploring to create virtualized services - among them, virtualized security, protocol termination and offload on switches, and Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) capabilities on server-to-switch links.

"We have an endless opportunity to migrate features from operating systems and applications into the network," Giancarlo said. "This is what will allow servers, computers and networks to scale, the ability to offload processors and make them available to perform other work at a higher level . . . [and] create a virtual backplane between networks, storage and pools of processors."

Giancarlo said Cisco gear will be more tied to applications.

"Today we do packet-level routing," Giancarlo said. "Where we really see ourselves going is towards full message based routing things like XML messages or MQ messages."

This could include products that accelerate XML-based traffic, or secure it through filtering and deep-packet inspection. "All this will be fueled by standardizations taking place in the messaging community around XML and other Web services standards. This is much closer than many people believe," he said.

"These concepts are important in building data centers with endpoints that are much more agile," said Mario Mazzola, Cisco's chief development officer. "This is under the vision of an IBM, or HP, in relation to grid computing," which promises to provide computing services as utilities that can be tapped into anywhere and from any device. "This might be, for Cisco, one area of interesting innovation and growth over the next few years," he said.

HP and IBM are the main systems vendors driving utility computing, says Steven Schuchart, a senior analyst with Current Analysis. "It makes sense for Cisco to align their strategy with those vendors," he says.

Others say that while Cisco uses language similar to HP's and IBM's, its view of the virtualized IT infrastructure is vastly different.