Cisco Adds New Services To Its Data Centre Portfolio

The Unified Network Services (UNS) have been introduced by Cisco as an expansion of its data centre products and services portfolio to keep pace with changes in IT infrastructures. The services have been designed to deliver any network service, in any environment and in any form factor, the company said.

Enhancements will also be appearing for Unified Fabric and Unified Computing under the umbrella title of Cisco Data Centre Business Advantage. These changes enable Cisco to support rising business models such as desktop virtualisation and public or private clouds.

Centrally Managed Environment

Scott Ciccone, Cisco’s product marketing manager for the Unified Computing System Solution, wrote in his blog, “Unified Computing is a revolutionary new approach to the virtualised data centre. It offers the means to integrate virtualised compute, network, and storage access into a centrally managed environment.”

He goes on to explain that Cisco has chosen its building block approach to spread and reduce cost. Customers can make improvements incrementally as needs and budgets allow.

“Mapping IT innovations to deliver business impact is very critical for us,” said Bob Butler, CIO of the Hay Group management consultancy. “With the Cisco Unified Computing System and Nexus solutions we’ve already achieved increased reliability, availability and cost savings.”

Virtual appliances

The initial output to support UNS comprises two appliances and a heavy duty blade server.

The Cisco Virtual Security Gateway (VSG) is a virtual appliance designed to provide security policies at the virtual machine (VM) level. It works within and across Virtual LANs (VLANs) and shared-compute environments in the data centre. The gateway is software-based and runs on the Cisco Nexus 1000V switch to provide policy-based controls and activity monitoring based on VM context.

The second virtual appliance is based on the current Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) WAN-optimisation appliance. The new VWAAS runs on a VMware ESX/ESXi hypervisor and Cisco UCS or other x86-based servers to accelerate network traffic.

The final release is the half-width, UCS B230 M1 Blade Server which has 32 DIMM memory slots to provide up to 512GB. It runs on two Intel Xeon 7500 or 6500 processors to provide the performance to drive a dual-port, converged I/O adapter for 20Gbps throughput.