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Cisco introduced an appliance that lets servers be provisioned off storage on the network.
Cisco on Tuesday rolled out a software/hardware combination designed to automate provisioning and booting of servers from images stored on storage-area networks (SAN) or network-attached storage (NAS) devices.
VFrame Data Center is supplied on a 1U (1.75-inch) high rack-mounted x86 server-based appliance running embedded Red Hat Linux. The offering was announced as part of a broad Cisco data center strategy.
VFrame Data Center software was written to run natively on a server that contains both Fibre Channel host bus adapters and Ethernet network adapters so it doesn't require a gateway to virtualize the runtime image in the server. It differs from Cisco's VFrame IB (InfiniBand) technology, introduced a couple of years ago, which used gateway technology. The gateway did the I/O mapping of servers containing an InfiniBand adapter to downstream Ethernet or Fibre Channel services.
“Cisco is aligning the provisioning of network and I/O connectivity resources for general purpose LANs, as well as storage-specific SANs and NAS infrastructure with the management of server-side resources to support virtual data centers,” says Greg Schulz, senior analyst with StorageIO.
Schulz says VFrame Data Center goes a long way toward automating data center operations.
“The reality with virtual data centers and virtual IT resources is that they still rely on real and physical resources in the form of servers, storage, networks and software that need to be configured and managed,” Schulz says. “Someone has to manage the different pieces of the physical infrastructure to support a virtual environment and Cisco is taking a step in the right direction to support and virtualize the management of I/O connectivity for virtual servers.”
The controller of the VFrame Data Center sits in the management and control plane, not in the data plane, where storage and network operations could be disrupted. The server's boot image can be changed on the fly by redirecting the server to another boot image. Through the dynamic redirecting of that server to the different boot image, for instance, IT could run the server on Windows one minute and the next on Linux. Cisco is also working on support for VMware Infrastructure 3 by year-end.
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Comments (4)
Answer from CiscoBy Cisconet on August 20, 2007, 1:28 pmHere's the answer from a Cisco spokesperson to Dominique's questions: The control interfaces are based on Ethernet as well from a transport standpoint. There...
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VFrame Data Center questionsBy Cisconet on August 20, 2007, 12:45 pmDear Dominique, This is a question that Cisco should answer and I'm trying to get someone at Cisco to respond to your question here. In the meantime, perhaps...
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VFrame Data CenterBy Dominique Verchere on August 17, 2007, 10:18 amWhat are the external control/Management interfaces that VFrame Data Center export to allow connecting Server equipments (Storage, Computing or others) ? It is...
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Cisco appliance automates server provisioning, bootingBy Cisco Subnet on July 25, 2007, 5:33 pmCisco on Tuesday rolled out a software/hardware combination designed to automate provisioning and booting of servers from images stored on SAN or NAS devices. VFrame...
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