Cisco Unveils Cloud, Data Center Technologies

Drawing on its strengths in data center and cloud computing, Cisco has unveiled a brace of new products and upgrades designed to enable enterprise users to scale their IT capabilities quicker and at less cost.

Announced Wednesday at CiscoLive!, the networking giant's user meeting in Las Vegas, the new offerings range from Cisco FabricPath, a networking technology for data centers, to Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution, which enables existing users of Cisco Unified Communications to better utilize their existing hosted Cisco Unified Communications offerings.

In addition to enabling users to soup up their data center performance, Cisco Data Path, a part of Cisco's NX-OS data center operating system, addresses the challenges presented by the rapid growth of data center and cloud computing. The offering also leans heavily on Cisco's support of the Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Lines (TRILL) even as it promotes data center-wide scalability.

The use of Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) extensions is also improved, according to the CiscoLive! announcement. The announcement notes that Cisco WAAS will be able to be deployed in branch offices as an on-demand service while Cisco WAAS 4.2 improves support for Windows-server-on WAAS (WoW).

Mobile users were not neglected in the Wednesday announcements: WAAS Mobile 3.5 has been tailored for quick deployment in cloud computing, the company said.

Cisco is also drawing on its growing Cloud Enablement Services program to attract more partners to the program, which includes its Cisco Intelligent Automation for IT Services program to help simplify data center management.

The Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution is aimed at helping Cisco partner data centers organize multiple collaboration apps on one server in a virtualized environment. Later the applications can be hosted for multiple client organizations so the partners can deploy large, multi-customer installations.

"Through the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution," said Cisco's Barry O'Sullivan in a statement, "Cisco is enabling our partners to provide cloud-based solutions that offer unmatched levels of flexibility for their customers."

The solution can be deployed in an "as a service" model, O'Sullivan indicated. He is senior vice president of Cisco's Voice Technology Group.