Cisco last week insisted, in the face of some skepticism, that its products will be the key ingredient for businesses trying to virtualize IT services such as storage, processing, applications and security.
SAN JOSE – Cisco last week insisted, in the face of some skepticism, that its products will be the key ingredient for businesses trying to virtualize IT services such as storage, processing, applications and security.
On the week of the company’s 20th anniversary, executives at Cisco’s worldwide analyst conference sounded more like the vendor’s older siblings in enterprise IT – namely, HP and IBM. In outlining the company’s strategy for corporate data center networks, executives freely tossed about buzzwords such as “virtualization,” “on-demand” and “adaptive enterprise” – even giving credit to IBM and HP when doing so.
At issue is the question of where intelligence should reside in a virtualized infrastructure – on computers, or in the network itself, as Cisco believes. Cisco must avoid stepping on the toes of its channel and integration partners – including HP and IBM – as it eyes a bigger piece of the IT and network integration services pie, industry experts say.
Cisco CEO John Chambers said the company is pushing to move more server-based services into networks.
“We’re moving from just the transport of voice, video and data [over IP] to a virtualization of services” in data centers, Chambers said. “Ethernet is going to play a huge role in this evolution.”
Cisco CTO Charlie Giancarlo and other technologists outlined methods Cisco is exploring to create virtualized services – among them, virtualized security, protocol termination and offload on switches, and Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) capabilities on server-to-switch links.
“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.”
Giancarlo said Cisco gear will be more tied to applications.
“Today we do packet-level routing,” Giancarlo said. “Where we really see ourselves going is towards full message based routing things like XML messages or MQ messages.”
This could include products that accelerate XML-based traffic, or secure it through filtering and deep-packet inspection. “All this will be fueled by standardizations taking place in the messaging community around XML and other Web services standards. This is much closer than many people believe,” he said.
“These concepts are important in building data centers with endpoints that are much more agile,” said Mario Mazzola, Cisco’s chief development officer. “This is under the vision of an IBM, or HP, in relation to grid computing,” which promises to provide computing services as utilities that can be tapped into anywhere and from any device. “This might be, for Cisco, one area of interesting innovation and growth over the next few years,” he said.
HP and IBM are the main systems vendors driving utility computing, says Steven Schuchart, a senior analyst with Current Analysis. “It makes sense for Cisco to align their strategy with those vendors,” he says.
Others say that while Cisco uses language similar to HP’s and IBM’s, its view of the virtualized IT infrastructure is vastly different.
“Cisco is saying that the network is central with everything,” says Frank Dzubeck, president of Communications Network Architects. “But I thought applications and IT were the center of everything.”
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.
“IBM doesn’t believe that and neither does HP,” Dzubeck says. “Their mentality is that it all plays together – storage, the network and computing.”
Other observers say the technology approaches that Cisco is proposing are not so new. Upstart vendors such as Redline Networks, Netscaler and Crescendo Networks – makers of so-called application front-end devices – have had switches and appliances on the market for more than a year that streamline data center networks with protocol-termination RDMA technology.
Other such start-ups as Sarvega and DataPower are also ahead of Cisco with routers and appliances that speed up and secures XML-based traffic.
“A lot of the niche [vendors] are ahead of the traditional networking companies” in the areas of performance for data center networking gear, says Mike Smith, CTO of Forbes.com. To support its huge traffic volumes, the Web site uses boxes from Crescendo, which provide switching, load balancing and RDMA capabilities for speeding up server performance.
Selling this concept to businesses such as annuities giant ING Group will be Cisco’s challenge.
“Cisco is going to have to convince not just a networking team, but a server team and a storage team that they can do this for them,” says Kelly Lursen, a network manager at ING Group. “It reminds me of mainframes. When we needed an extra cycle out of the mainframe, we’d put in a [front-end processor] to offload the work from the mainframe.”
Besides pushing these on-demand themes, another way Cisco plans to emulate its enterprise IT counterparts is by ramping up its services offerings.
“If we had to do the late 1990s all over again, we would have focused more not on how to get customers to consume IT products, but how to help customers change business processes,” Chambers said. “There is a strong opportunity for Cisco not just to be a strategic vendor, but a trusted business adviser as well.”
Many of Cisco’s largest customers are asking for the vendor to become more involved in the planning and integration of Cisco products, either alongside or instead of channel partners, network integrators and service providers, Chambers said.
Cisco this week will announce that HP is joining the Cisco Global Services Alliance program.The alliance will give customers a combined installation and support service when installing HP computing products and Cisco network gear, the vendor says. HP is the first large IT provider to join Cisco’s program, which was announced in June
“With Cisco’s view of being a trusted adviser and putting together all the architecture, it sounds like they should be in the services business, but they’re not,” says Jon Oltsik, a senior analyst with Enterprise Strategies Group.
Dzubeck of Communications Network Architects says the plan to skim the top services accounts could rub partners the wrong way.
“The issue is when they step over bounds,” Dzubeck says. “IBM has 30,000 people who do [services] for a living. You’ll see problems arise when Cisco’s ideas of business transformation get in the way of IBM’s.”
