In the last newsletter we pointed out that Cisco recently acquired a network management company – Linesider. We also pointed out that this is the first network management company that Cisco has acquired since 2005. In this newsletter we will explain the functionality that Linesider brings to Cisco and explain why this acquisition makes total sense given Cisco’s corporate direction.
Tech industry’s M&As in 2010
As mentioned in the last newsletter, Cisco is one of several companies attempting to bring to market solutions that integrate networking, servers and storage. Linesider provides an orchestration system that helps to make that possible. To put orchestration functionality into perspective, it is helpful to think back about a decade or so to when application service providers (ASP) first exploded onto the scene. At that time Jim was working with a start-up company that was attempting to sell equipment to ASPs. One of the reasons that this start-up, and for the most part the whole ASP marketplace, didn’t succeed is that they couldn’t solve the problem of automatically provisioning the necessary infrastructure services.
This is exactly the problem that an orchestration system solves. In an orchestration system, such as the one provided by Linesider, policies define the relationship between users, computing resources, security and network services. These policies are automatically translated in real-time into device configurations that dynamically provision the necessary resources and/or modify the resource pool to bring it into alignment with the service definition. User access information is updated in user directories and network access control system databases. The virtual server requirements of the service are communicated to the hypervisor management system. The hypervisor management system provides the required VMs and also can provision the networked or virtualized storage required by the VMs from a storage pool that has been placed at the disposal of the virtualized infrastructure.
Storage provisioning from the pool can performed via storage plugins in the hypervisor manager. The hypervisor manager will also be able to make the necessary configuration changes for virtual switches and virtual appliances under its control. Network elements not under the control of the hypervisor management system (for example routers, switches, firewalls, and other external devices that provide secure access to networked services) are controlled on an individual basis by the orchestration system.
The orchestration system also communicates with traditional network management solutions, such as fault and performance management systems, which can help to monitor services and assure that the service level specified in the policies are being delivered for each network service.
If Cisco is going to be a leader in the potentially emerging world of converged infrastructure, it needs the orchestration functionality that Linesider provides. The challenge now is for Cisco, a company that is not known for network management, to fully leverage the investment that it has made, and find ways to build on the functionality that it acquired.
