Cisco Unveils Data Center 3.0: A Road Map Toward Making All Servers Virtual

Cisco made several product announcements at its Networker's conference this week, all under the "Data Center 3.0" slogan. Other than that they're all designed for the data center, there's little real connection between them, but this doesn't mean that Cisco lacks an overall plan. For the first time, it has spelled out the endgame of its virtualization strategy, which looks increasingly like the end of physical servers as we know them.

There are three main new products:

• VFrame Data Center. The most ambitious announcement, this is an appliance based on VFrame, the virtualization management software that Cisco acquired with Topspin in 2005. Whereas Topspin was focused on InfiniBand and storage, the new VFrame DC appliance is designed for IP, and for other resources besides storage. Cisco describes it as a platform for orchestrating network, server and storage resources into new virtual services, offering an API that developers can build on. According to Cisco, the API isn't simply an interface to program the VFrame DC, but an interface to program the network itself.

In practical terms, this means that Cisco is in competition with many of its software and server partners, though of course Cisco denies that. It claims that a network device is far more powerful than mere software, offering deeper visibility into the application stack: Whereas management software could only see the virtual resources, a network appliance can look inside packets all the way from Layer 1 to 7, understanding what hardware a virtual service depends on.

There may be some truth to this: Cisco is certainly right about the problem of mapping the virtual to the physical, but there's no reason that the same can't be done in software. VFrame DC is essentially middleware in a box, abstracting multiple resources into a single API, so its success will depend on the API's adoption by developers. Cisco says that it is working with developer partners, but can't announce anything yet, though the API is also open to customers and ISVs.• ACE-XML. This shares a brand name with the Application Control Engine (ACE), Cisco's giant load balancer blade, but little else. It is essentially the XML firewall (SOA security gateway) that Cisco acquired with Reactivity earlier this year, repackaged as a blade for the Catalyst 6500 data center switch.

Naming the Reactivity box after ACE hints at closer integration to come, though at present this just means that they are aimed at the same kind of customers, not that they have any real connection (other than sharing the 6500 chassis.) Both represent a hardware option for many SOA functions, competing with Citrix and F5.

• Trusted WAN optimization, which encrypts the enormous caches of data on WAAS boxes. See our analysis here.

According to Cisco, it will have many more data center products over the next 24 months, but it is already sharing its long-term vision in which everything except the network is virtualized.

In Cisco's view, the long-term trend in server hardware is replacement of local devices by shared network resources. It began with peripherals like printers, and has now moved to internal hardware like disk drives. The next step is networked CPUs and networked memory. Cisco admits that this is unlikely to happen within its 24 month time frame, but believes that it will occur within the life cycle of current Cisco products, around ten years.If memory and CPUs move out into the network, what will be left for servers to do? Cisco doesn't really have an answer to this, but claims it isn't trying to compete with servers: The server vendors will have to adapt to the new network-centric architecture, just as they are embracing virtualization.

Cisco's motivation for all this is fairly clear: It's a networking vendor, so it wants the network to be the most important thing in the data center. But to fulfill its vision, it will need to persuade customers that there is a compelling reason for the network to be more than just a pipe, and that is less clear.