News

posted on 25 June 2008 11:57

Cisco has its sights set on selling a virtual data center centralized around a virtual network and has announced updates to products and services in its Data Center 3.0 grand scheme of data center things. Storage has a bit part role in all this.

As Cisco describes it the company has announced 'new products and professional services that will help customers virtualize data centers for greater operational and energy efficiency. The new offerings make the virtual network a highly efficient platform for delivering data center services-accelerating, providing security, and orchestrating application delivery networks, servers, virtualized computing, and storage, while providing greater responsiveness and resource conservation.'

This set of announcements include:

- Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) software release 4.1, offering virtualized application hosting services, greater application acceleration and video delivery for the branch office, enabling customers to deploy platforms such as Microsoft Windows Server 2008 locally at the branch office on a Cisco WAAS appliance, reducing server hardware requirements. In addition, version 4.1 simplifies customer deployments and provides application-specific acceleration features for Microsoft Exchange (MAPI), web applications (HTTP), live and on-demand video (RTSP), centralized printing (Windows Print), and Unix/Linux file sharing (NFS).

- Cisco Application Control Engine (ACE) software release 3.1 for the ACE 4710 application switch, offering up to 4 gigabits per second (Gbps) of throughput and up to 2 Gbps of compression capability, and multimedia readiness on a virtualized platform.

- Cisco VFrame Data Center software release 1.2, offering end-to-end infrastructure provisioning with Cisco ACE and VMware ESX. IT managers can optimize virtual, compute, storage and network resources with near real-time deployment agility, based on the provisioning intelligence within VFrame. VFrame 1.2 offers integration with Cisco ACE and VMware ESX, including the ability to virtualize servers to ACE virtual devices, and/or to select a server out of a utility pool, and configure it end-to-end with ESX. Cisco VFrame provisions resources intelligently, with policies and an advanced rules-checking engine, and securely, with a multi-layer, roles-based access-control interface.

There are new data center services announced too. Check out Cico's website for details.

The storage end of this set of announcements is not very exciting at all.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}