Datamation Logo

Cisco Sets Sights on Server Management

July 25, 2007
Datamation content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More .

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.

Cisco VFrame
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.

  SEE ALL
APPLICATIONS ARTICLES
 

Subscribe to Data Insider

Learn the latest news and best practices about data science, big data analytics, artificial intelligence, data security, and more.

Datamation Logo

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.

Advertisers

Advertise with TechnologyAdvice on Datamation and our other data and technology-focused platforms.

Advertise with Us

Our Brands


Privacy Policy Terms & Conditions About Contact Advertise California - Do Not Sell My Information

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.