* Analysis of Cisco's acquisition of Topspin Communications
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.
“The widespread adoption of server architectures such as blades, grid computing and clustered applications is driving an emerging market opportunity within the data center,” said Luca Cafiero, senior vice president of Cisco’s Data Center, Switching and Wireless Technology Group, in a statement. “Topspin’s server fabric switches and virtualization software [gives] customers compelling end-to-end data center switching capabilities.”
Another analyst sees a potential battle emerging, where Cisco and IT vendors, such as Dell, HP, IBM, and Sun, play tug-of-war over where network intelligence should reside – either in network gear, such as switches and routers, or in clusters of servers and blade chassis.
“The idea of reducing servers to just something with RDMA pipes is something Cisco seems interested in doing,” says Frank Dzubeck, president of Communications Network Architects, an IT consultancy.
Dzubeck says Cisco’s version of virtual data centers and utility computing would make servers into “dumb” boxes running processes and storing data, while the intelligence of how processors, storage and other services are utilized, managed and made available would reside in switches and routers.
Its strategy “is to reduce [servers] to dumb machines that just execute instructions and fetch data from storage,” he says. “IBM doesn’t believe that and neither does HP. Their mentality is that it all plays together – storage, networking and computing – as a seamless entity. Cisco’s approach seems to be more along the lines of, ‘we control the flow and the information, and [IT vendor products] just execute.'” But, he adds, “ultimately, it’s not networking that control the direction of computing intelligence, it’s IT companies.”
To this point, Cisco says potential rivalry with key enterprise partners is a non-issue.
Partners such as IBM, Dell and HP currently resell Topspin switches along with their respective data center server platforms, says Jackie Ross, vice president of marketing for Cisco’s Storage Technology Group. Also, while the Topspin acquisition gives Cisco a new product category, in the host bus adapters that go into servers and interoperate with the switches, Ross adds, “I don’t think we will be in the HBA market for the long run.”
