SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - September 12, 2007) - VMworld -- Cisco® (
NASDAQ:
CSCO) today
announced the integration of Cisco VFrame Data Center with VMware Virtual
Infrastructure, a key solution for the Cisco vision of next generation data
centers, called Data Center 3.0. The solutions and services that support
Cisco Data Center 3.0 are designed to help customers better utilize their
data center resources, deploy more robust business continuance, and enhance
data security. Cisco's integration with VMware Infrastructure 3 offers
customers enhanced IT automation capabilities, including added VMware ESX
Server capacity on demand, as well as orchestrated configuration of network
services. Customers will benefit from increased IT agility and
flexibility, faster coordinated provisioning of storage and network
resources, and improved business continuance.
"Cisco and VMware share a joint vision for driving and supporting a
service-oriented approach for the data center," said Krish Ramakrishnan,
vice president and general manager, Server Virtualization Business Unit,
Cisco. "Together our efforts support the IT collaboration that will be
required across organizations to streamline operations and take advantage
of the data center technology advancements to come."
Cisco began the technical collaboration with VMware as a result of customer
feedback requesting a tighter integration with Cisco Catalyst® and MDS
technologies to support the scaling of their VMware Infrastructure
deployments. By adding service orchestration, Cisco VFrame DC can provision
all the network services for Internet-facing applications running on VMware
Infrastructure, including firewalls, content load balancing, switch and
server trunks, and access control lists; all from a single GUI-based
service template. This integration enables network, storage, and security
IT groups to collaborate using a common design interface for dramatic
improvements in real-time provisioning agility.
"VMware customers are used to being able to rapidly provision and configure
virtual infrastructure," said Brian Byun, vice president of global partners
and solutions, VMware. "Now, with Cisco's integration of VFrame DC,
customers can also get similar benefits for their physical infrastructure.
VFrame DC enables coordinated provisioning of physical resources (network,
storage and server) to complement their virtualized infrastructure."
Through the joint integration efforts, VFrame Data Center dynamically loads
VMware ESX Server onto bare-metal computer hardware, configures the
physical server I/O to utilize Cisco data center switches, and offers a two
way policy API with VMware VirtualCenter to coordinate the configuration.
VFrame DC can load VMware ESX Server onto physical hardware from a storage
area network (SAN) in under 10 minutes. VFrame DC automatically configures
the SAN back-end, including the SAN fabrics and the shared LUNS, based on
design templates that are predefined by the storage and networking teams.
Automating the addition of new VMware ESX Server instances based on demand,
capacity, facilities, and high-availability policies enhances IT agility
because servers can be brought up in minutes, automatically, with all of
the virtual networking services configured.
"As customers increasingly leverage the live migration capabilities in
their virtualization software, they will need to dynamically reconfigure
the network as VMs move from one host to another," said Lucinda Borovick,
Director of Data Center Networks, IDC. "Dynamic reconfiguration such as
that provided by Cisco VFrame DC will help close the security holes
associated with live migration today and sets up a strong foundation for
the next generation data center."
"Cisco and VMware are clearly viewing the data center as a set of
virtualized resources all orchestrated together," said Vince Conroy, Chief
Technology Officer, FusionStorm. "Cisco VFrame Data Center is one of the
first products to be released that begins coupling these together,
including the integration of VI3 servers, with virtualized networking
services. We are very interested in working with customers to help
integrate these two very exciting products together."
In booth #429 Cisco will showcase the results of its collaborative efforts
with VMware in a series of demonstrations.
-- Cisco VFrame DC and VMware VirtualCenter - Automating Virtual
Infrastructure Provisioning
Cisco will demonstrate access provisioning for storage area networks (SANs)
and local area networks (LANs) for VMware ESX Server environments, as well
as automated failover for physical servers hosting VMware ESX Server. The
Cisco bi-directional VFrame DC API communicates with VMware VirtualCenter's
VI API to orchestrate the provisioning of SAN and LAN networking
requirements defined in service templates. This new version of VFrame DC
being demonstrated will be available for customer evaluations later this
year, with general availability in early 2008.
-- N Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) and Cisco SAN Device Virtualization
(SDV)
NPIV allows a single F-port to communicate with multiple virtual host bus
adapters (HBAs), allowing logical unit number (LUN) assignment, zoning, and
QoS to be managed similar to separate physical servers, while still
maintaining the cost advantages of virtualized server technology. Cisco
SDV creates virtual SAN devices to accelerate swap out or failover to a
replacement disk array, and to minimize downtime when replacing host bus
adapters or when re-hosting an application on a different server.
-- Virtual Network Services in VMware Environments
Service-oriented provisioning of network resources, such as firewalls and
content load balancing, enables centralized network resource consolidation
to complement server consolidation and provide compelling cost reduction
across the data center.
Cisco VFrame DC
VFrame DC is designed to reduce application deployment times, improve
overall resource utilization, and offer greater business agility. With
VFrame DC, customers can link their compute, networking and storage
infrastructures together as a set of virtualized services. This services
approach provides a simple yet powerful way to quickly view all the
services configured at the application level to improve troubleshooting and
change management. VFrame DC has four modular components: design,
discovery, deploy, and operations, which are integrated together with a
robust security interface that allows controlled access by multiple
organizations. Information on Cisco VFrame DC can be found at:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps8463/index.html
Data Center 3.0
The Cisco vision for Data Center 3.0 entails the real-time, dynamic
orchestration of infrastructure services from shared pools of virtualized
server, storage and network resources, while optimizing application service
levels, efficiency and collaboration. Cisco and its partners are helping
organizations to design and build virtualized, self-defending and efficient
data center infrastructure for delivering superior application performance
and user experience.
About Cisco Systems
Cisco (
NASDAQ:
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how people connect, communicate and collaborate. Information about Cisco
can be found at
http://www.cisco.com. For ongoing news, please go to
http://newsroom.cisco.com.
Cisco, the Cisco logo, Cisco Systems, and the Cisco Systems logo are
registered trademarks or trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. and/or its
affiliates in the United States and certain other countries. All other
trademarks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective
owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership
relationship between Cisco and any other company. This document is Cisco
Public Information.
This press announcement is in conjunction with a keynote speech by Cisco
Chairman and CEO John Chambers to be delivered via live video Webcast
today, September 12, at 8:00 a.m. PT. To view the Webcast presentation,
please go to:
www.vmworld.com/webcast
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Contact Information: Press Contact:
Lee Davis
Cisco
(408) 526-6530
leedavis@cisco.com
Investor Relations Contact:
Marisa Ross
Cisco
(408) 527-9830
mariross@cisco.com
Industry Analyst Contact:
Amal Nichols
Cisco
(408) 526-6493
amnichol@cisco.com