The spin on Cisco's latest acquisition

With its acquisition of Topspin Communications last week, Cisco is leaping deeper into the corporate data center beyond its traditional role as a high-speed Ethernet switch vendor.

The $250 million buyout of Topspin gives Cisco a range of high-speed InfiniBand data center switching gear; software for virtualizing servers into utility or grid computing resources; and specialized, high-speed I/O technology for shunting network traffic directly into server memory. But what some industry observers note about the move is Cicso's expansion into areas that might be getting away from the vendor's core competency: Ethernet/IP switching and routing.

Others say the move could create tension with key Cisco partners in the large enterprise market, such as IBM and HP, as computing and network vendors both pull more network intelligence into their respective realms of influence.

Topspin's switches are deployed in data centers and attach directly to servers through high-speed InfiniBand connections. This technology gives servers very fast bus speeds, up to 4G bit/sec, and allow for technologies such as remote direct memory access (RDMA), which streams data directly from the network to server memory, bypassing the server's CPU(s), thus increasing application performance. The Topspin gear combines these technologies with an IP switching backplane, which connects to Ethernet LAN switches in a data center. The company competed with such vendors as InfiniCon and Voltare, which also are in the InfiniBand switching market.

The Topspin switches also can be programmed to virtualize server resources, which lets users move processing power of servers to different applications and storage pools to accommodate shifting workloads. (For instance, processing power could be diverted to financial applications at the end of a closing period, and diverted elsewhere at regular times.)

"One of the biggest threats to Cisco before this acquisition was Intel-based clusters that stripped away intelligence from the data and storage networks," says Jon Oltsik, senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group. "This move ensures that Cisco will play a role in the server clustering space. Knowing Cisco, it will attract lots of partners and become a center of development activity."

The move to acquire Topspin was foreshadowed in statements made by Cisco CTO and executive vice president Charles Giancarlo at the vendor's analyst conference in December 2004.

"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."

Cisco executives say the integration of Topspin switches into its lineup of Fibre Channel, iSCSI, Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet technologies for data centers will give customers more ways to lay out data center network blueprints.