Cisco's virtualization a multiyear investment

SAN JOSE -- Customers should count on spending three years to completely implement Cisco's Data Center 3.0 architecture, company officials said this week at the C-Scape 2007 conference.

(More from C-Scape: Cisco opening up IOS.) 

Data Center 3.0, unveiled last summer, is centered on virtualizing and orchestrating server, storage and network provisioning resources to achieve cost and resource-provisioning efficiencies. The strategy took Cisco three years to fill out and customers should bank on that much time to fully adopt it, according to Jayshree Ullal, Cisco senior vice president of the Data Center, Switching and Services Group.

That's because customers may be comfortable with current products and operational methods, she says.

“It's hard to break what's not broken,” Ullal says, referring to existing data center provisioning tools. “We're changing old habits” of disrupting separately managed and staffed server, storage and networking “silos.”

Cisco itself is implementing Data Center 3.0 in a piecemeal fashion. Its key service provisioning and orchestration system, VFrame, will be implemented in new Cisco data centers, Ullal says.

Cisco will employ “selective insertion” of the product in existing data centers, she says.

Despite the multiyear implementation requirement, customers are receptive of the Data Center 3.0 vision, Ullal says. On a scale of 1 to 10, “the vision is a 9,” she says.

“But deployment is in pieces. Unless it's a greenfield [data center] you can't implement it all at once. Our biggest challenge is to get more deployment.”

Nonetheless, Cisco plans to take its virtualization vision beyond the data center. Through its Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) product for boosting application performance, virtualization can be extended to the branch office, Ullal says.

Cisco plans to soon roll out a WAAS client for mobile users.

Cisco also plans to utilize partnerships with Microsoft and VMware to virtualize desktop environments within three years; and to the home through its Scientific-Atlanta set-top boxes, she says.

In the home, the set-top box and broadband CPE can serve as a virtualized point of presence for video and content delivery services.