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Cisco guns for data centers
By Stephen Lawson
IDG News Service, 12/08/04
Cisco Tuesday took dead aim at data centers at its annual Worldwide Analyst Conference, with company executives claiming many communications functions in servers would be better off moved into the network.
That vision is likely to bring the networking giant into conflict with system vendors, according to some industry analysts who attended the conference in Santa Clara. But Cisco President and CEO John Chambers sees the move as part of a broad strategy to set Cisco apart from networking rivals, many coming from Asia, that are gearing up to compete on equipment price.
Cisco has decided to move further into data center functionality over the next year, looking to take a role in distributing storage and processing power across a network in a strategy called “service virtualization.”
“It won’t be as much dependent on a (particular) device with a service. … You won’t care whether those (services) are in the data center or in remote locations,” Chambers said.
The company aims to help service providers and enterprises move functions such as security, spam filtering and server load balancing from servers to switches or routers, said Charlie Giancarlo, Cisco’s CTO and president of Cisco’s Linksys division. In some cases, those functions may be distributed across the network by making storage and processing power available as a pooled resource across a high-speed network, he said.
Giancarlo used the example of the firewall function, which began on a dedicated server and has gradually moved into the network, first on appliances and later on components of routers and switches. Other functions that Cisco sees moving into the network infrastructure or being distributed across the network include SSL encryption, intrusion detection systems, radio frequency identification (RFID) functions and disk management, he said. These types of functions take up valuable processing power on a server and can better scale up if they are running in the network infrastructure, he said.
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