Services Orientation For Cisco
Services Orientation For Cisco
May 24th, 2006: While lauding EMC's server and storagte virtualisation at EMC's Sydney 'Inform' conference this week, Cisco is also investing in storage virt' start-up, NeoPath.
Speaking yesterday at a press briefing held jointly with EMC in Sydney, Cisco's IT infrastructure director for data centre systems, Brian Christensen told IDM that, aside from a formalised development agreement between the two organisations, virtualisation of storage also forms a strong link - he used to example of EMC's Invista system that runs within Cisco switches.
Elsewhere, Christensen spoke about Cisco's 'Service Orientated Network Architecture' (SONA). Christensen pointed out that, although storage 'has been the focus since 2001, SONA has been in development for the last three years." During those three years, having 'got into the SAN world' Cisco has also managed a 35% increase in the storage utilisation.
Christensen was also keen to explain that Cisco had a been able to achieve a US$300-million saving from retooling its own global data centres - and the 4-petabytes of storage therein - to become Service Orientated Data Centres.
Core to SONA is the use of both server and storage virtualisation to deliver holistic IT services from hardware and bandwidth provisioning to application automation using the network as the key enabler. The concentration on virtualising environments, however, did not result in any mention of Cisco's recent investment in NeoPath Networks which makes storage virtualisation software, most notably, FileDirector.
Christensen told IDM that, "Cisco is not just providing connectivity, it is also enabling applications". While he lauded EMC's Rainfinity and Invista virtualisation offerings, Cisco was also investing in NeoPath's storage virtualisation technology. US media sites are quoting Cisco in relation to its part in a US$11-million funding round to Neopath.
According to several outlets, the company is quoted as saying that, "Cisco thinks NeoPath has a strong storage migration tool, which is getting traction in the market. In addition, we are interested in their vision for virtualization in the Network Attached Storage space and in how this space develops"
Christensen was even more bullish when it comes to storage over IP, stating clearly that, "People come and talk to Cisco (because) the network is the thing that touches everything".
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