Next-gen data centers: hot, hot, hot

The big buzz this week comes from industry heavyweights Cisco and HP, both of which made lots of noise on technology strategies for next-generation IT infrastructure – what we here at Network World call the New Data Center. From Cisco, we’ve learned of Data Center 3.0 and the company’s plan to move full-steam ahead into automation and virtualization. Under Data Center 3.0, Cisco will bring together disparate data center networking technologies to create a single fabric for connection and virtualization of network elements. This is good news for all those Cisco shops out there, but it’s not exactly unexpected, either. Nor is it a novel idea. We’ve seen this type of strategy from many other vendors, big and small, some more comprehensive, others less so – with Cisco’s vision falling into the latter category. Already the company has a slew of Data Center 3.0 products in the offing, and has plotted out the next two years of development work. And by all means, leading enterprise IT executives have been building toward such a dynamic data center for several years now. Still, good to see Cisco take this next step toward that ideal. As for HP, the company pumped up its New Data Center automation strategy by buying Opsware for its data automation technology. That whopping $1.6 billion deal comes on the heels of BMC’s purchase of Opsware competitor RealOps, signaling just how hot automated data center management technologies are becoming for the enterprise. In our story on the deal, Will Cappelli, a Gartner analyst, described the vendor motivation as such: “The next big step for the big four management vendors is a move into automation in the areas of active configuration management and dynamic resource allocation. It will be a big disruptive play and a defining technology when they move into automation technologies.” Hey, it all validates our New Data Center vision, so we’re loving it. Read the HP-Opsware story Read the Cisco Data Center 3.0 story Visit our latest New Data Center site