October 3, 2005 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Cisco Systems (cisco.com) expanded its data center architecture late last week, announcing that it had added the InfiniBand-based Server Fabric Switch portfolio and new Vframe 3.0 data center virtualization software.
The new switching and virtualization software is designed to help enterprises manage and provision their grid systems through a new network-centric approach. Cisco says customers will benefit from better resource use, faster provisioning and reduced downtime.
According to Cisco, the SFS product portfolio uses InfiniBand technology to provide a unified fabric for connecting servers into grids of computing resources.
“InfiniBand is a compelling technology for our customers,” says Jayshree Ullal, senior vice president of the data center, switching and security technology group at Cisco. “By taking advantage of its inherent security and control capabilities, in addition to its well publicized high bandwidth and low latency characteristics, we are able to deliver to our customers high performance networking combined with the economics of a unified fabric and the flexibility of data center virtualization.”
VFrame provides virtualization and provisioning services to address Cisco data center resources including switching, data network, load balancing, and security products. Cisco says this will form the foundation of a virtualization software suite that will deliver end-to-end manageability, control and virtualization across the data center network.
