It takes a lot of moxie to jump into the server management side of the business ruled by such IT giants as IBM (Quote), HP (Quote) and others.
But that’s exactly what networking king Cisco Systems (Quote) plans to do, armed with a new product and new ideas.
At the company’s Networkers conference in Anaheim, Calif., Cisco today unveiled VFrame Data Center, a software/hardware platform intended to curb the abundance of x86 servers in corporate datacenters by provisioning applications in a point-and-click fashion.
The product is the core offering for the show, where Cisco officials touted Data Center 3.0, the company’s strategy for automating and choreographing infrastructure services from shared pools of virtualized server, storage and network resources.
Reducing hardware in datacenters is a hot topic at a time when machines are consuming so much power, sending energy costs skyrocketing, not to mention the cost to buy the hardware and cable it. And once that’s done, you’ve taken up a whole lot of space.
![]() |
The VFrame. Source: Cisco |
Several companies, including the server vendors and smaller players such as Opsware (Quote), BladeLogic, Scalent and Cassatt, are all working to combat server sprawl to alleviate companies’ financial and spatial pains. Cisco is only too happy to join the party.
“What we’ve been looking at here is to better provision these applications into the datacenter infrastructure, including the provisioning they would need for server, networking and storage services, Bill Erdman, product manager in Cisco’s datacenter technology group, told internetnews.com.
The classic approach to carving up network services is to add a piece of hardware to each application group for the particular service the hardware offers. For example, you’d add a firewall device for an SAP application, or an e-commerce application. But that can lead to 100 firewalls running at low utilization rates.
Running on a 1U appliance, VFrame virtualizes network services, such as the deployment of firewalls, virtual local area networks and wide-area networks, by pointing and clicking them on a server instead of the traditional method of throwing a raft of devices into the datacenter.
The VFrame appliance is stateless, so no machine has its own IP address, and users can move services from server to server, changing the personality of each machine on the fly.
VFrame solves the problems of servers getting stagnant with the same applications over several years. Erdman pointed to Cisco’s own Application Control Engine (ACE), which provides 255 virtual contexts within a content load balancer blade, as a textbook example.
“Rather than dedicate 255 appliances, you can carve the Application Control Engine in 255 contexts for 255 application groups,” Erdman said.
But VFrame will complement, not supplant, server and storage virtualization tools.
The executive said Cisco will work with server virtualization products, such as VMware Infrastructure, and storage virtualization tools, such as EMC’s Invista software.
“We are not the virtualization engine of the datacenter; we are a middleware platform that can provision the networking components and work with these other endpoint systems,” Erdman said.
Available in August, VFrame starts at $60,000 for each appliance and, based on servers and services, can cost $150,000.
This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.
Ethics and Artificial Intelligence: Driving Greater Equality
FEATURE | By James Maguire,
December 16, 2020
AI vs. Machine Learning vs. Deep Learning
FEATURE | By Cynthia Harvey,
December 11, 2020
Huawei’s AI Update: Things Are Moving Faster Than We Think
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
December 04, 2020
Keeping Machine Learning Algorithms Honest in the ‘Ethics-First’ Era
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
November 18, 2020
Key Trends in Chatbots and RPA
FEATURE | By Guest Author,
November 10, 2020
FEATURE | By Samuel Greengard,
November 05, 2020
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
November 02, 2020
How Intel’s Work With Autonomous Cars Could Redefine General Purpose AI
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
October 29, 2020
Dell Technologies World: Weaving Together Human And Machine Interaction For AI And Robotics
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
October 23, 2020
The Super Moderator, or How IBM Project Debater Could Save Social Media
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
October 16, 2020
FEATURE | By Cynthia Harvey,
October 07, 2020
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
October 05, 2020
CIOs Discuss the Promise of AI and Data Science
FEATURE | By Guest Author,
September 25, 2020
Microsoft Is Building An AI Product That Could Predict The Future
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
September 25, 2020
Top 10 Machine Learning Companies 2021
FEATURE | By Cynthia Harvey,
September 22, 2020
NVIDIA and ARM: Massively Changing The AI Landscape
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
September 18, 2020
Continuous Intelligence: Expert Discussion [Video and Podcast]
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By James Maguire,
September 14, 2020
Artificial Intelligence: Governance and Ethics [Video]
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By James Maguire,
September 13, 2020
IBM Watson At The US Open: Showcasing The Power Of A Mature Enterprise-Class AI
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
September 11, 2020
Artificial Intelligence: Perception vs. Reality
FEATURE | By James Maguire,
September 09, 2020
Datamation is the leading industry resource for B2B data professionals and technology buyers. Datamation's focus is on providing insight into the latest trends and innovation in AI, data security, big data, and more, along with in-depth product recommendations and comparisons. More than 1.7M users gain insight and guidance from Datamation every year.
Advertise with TechnologyAdvice on Datamation and our other data and technology-focused platforms.
Advertise with Us
Property of TechnologyAdvice.
© 2025 TechnologyAdvice. All Rights Reserved
Advertiser Disclosure: Some of the products that appear on this
site are from companies from which TechnologyAdvice receives
compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products
appear on this site including, for example, the order in which
they appear. TechnologyAdvice does not include all companies
or all types of products available in the marketplace.