Cisco Serious on Accelerating Virtualization VN-Link

As we all know, virtualization and cloud computing is getting faster and more featureful. As time sneaks by, more clearer picture is being drawn in the cloudy world where things were bit smoky months back. But there is one company who’s getting therir best into Virtualization to make it a big driver for SaaS.

Cisco is looking to accelerate the rate at which customers adopt and implement virtualization in their data centers.

Cisco Officials said. “Demand for virtualized data centers is high due to the complexity of managing and provisioning physical resources, securing that environment, maximizing utilization of assets, numerous network connections, and the rising costs of facilities and energy usage”.

“Power is increasing at a faster rate than the top line revenue of your company,” said John McCool, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s data center, switching and services group. McCool spoke at the Cisco Live conference in San Francisco.

The key driver had been it’s inherited benefits. Virtualization removes the logical view of an infrastructure from the physical underpinnings, thus making data center resources transparent to an application and enabling that application to move. Cisco itself was faced with a “$100 million server” issue – it needed the server but didn’t have enough room for it in a current data center and faced an expensive build out of a new facility just to house it. But virtualization let Cisco pocket that stash. Virtualizing its data centers reduced its cable plant by 4,800 cables made room for 50% more physical servers and increased virtual machine capacity fourfold.

Definitely, this gave Cisco a practical approach for virtualization.

Another example,  a New Jersey financial institution. They were opening an office in Bangalore opted to host applications in New Jersey and implement virtual desktops in India with Cisco’s Wide Area Application Services and Application Control Engine products to save money.

But virtualization poses few challenges. It makes the mobile VM difficult to monitor and track and thus hard to manage. That’s why Cisco developed VN-Link, software that allows the network to become VM-aware and map policies to a VM as it moves across physical ports.though previously  when Oracle bought Virtual Iron, Oracle got this feature in-built too. But Actually, Virtual Iron is much more powerful than what Cisco solution is. That might mean that Cisco is not alone, it’s quiet possible Oracle is also packing it’s bags for serious Cloud Computing.

Cisco’s VN-Link is intended to provide full visibility to VMs for the network administrator and VM management for the systems administrator. VN-Link is integral to Cisco’s Nexus 2148T fabric extender to provide network interface virtualization, which provides a “direct, consistent view of VMs and the (data center) operational model” by divorcing VMs from their physical interfaces.

This, combined with a unified switching fabric supporting Ethernet and Fibre Channel, simplifies and provides greater and more consistent visibility into all data center operations, Bugnion said. The environment can be managed from a network perspective or from a server perspective, he said.

Cisco’s platform for enabling all of this, of course, is the Unified Computing System. UCS is intended to be a single point of data center management through its ability to discover, view and configure resources, such as servers, and apply and enforce service profiles on those servers.

“Our strategy (with UCS) is to accelerate virtualization through increased visibility and control,” Bugnion said. “We’re focused on that part of the data center in which the network plays a central role. Management and energy efficiency is not an afterthought.”

To date, Savvis and Thomson Reuters are two publicly announced potential customers for UCS. They note significant results from using or trialing virtualization and UCS.

The future of cloud computing lies in hands of success of Virtualization. Cisco, Oracle, IBM, HP, and lots other are serious in making it a success.

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