Cisco Introduces Innovative New Data Center Virtualization Orchestration Solution

Cisco® (NASDAQ: CSCO) announced today VFrame Data Center (VFrame DC), an orchestration platform that leverages network intelligence to provision resources together as virtualized services. This industry-first approach greatly reduces application deployment times, improves overall resource utilization, and offers greater business agility. Further, VFrame DC includes an open API, and easily integrates with third party management applications, as well as best-of-breed server and storage virtualization offerings.

With VFrame DC, customers can now 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 offers a policy engine for automating resource changes in response to infrastructure outages and performance changes. Additionally, these changes can be controlled by external monitoring systems via integration with the VFrame DC web services application programming interface (API).

“Taking advantage of the ubiquity of the network to orchestrate data center services could help data centers evolve beyond their current siloed functions,” said Lucinda Borovick, Director of Data Center Networks, IDC. “This approach has the potential to deliver more efficient application provisioning, reduce costs, and increase IT productivity.”

VFrame DC is a highly efficient orchestration platform for service provisioning which requires only a single controller and one back-up controller. The real time provisioning engine has a comprehensive view of compute, storage and network resources. This view enables VFrame DC to provision resources as virtualized services using graphical design templates. These design templates comprise one of four VFrame DC modular components: design, discovery, deploy, and operations. These components are integrated together with a robust security interface that allows controlled access by multiple organizations.

“VFrame Data Center offers unprecedented orchestration within the data center network, for dynamically re-programming server, storage and network resources into agile application services,” said Jayshree Ullal, Senior Vice President, Data Center, Switching and Security Technology Group, Cisco. “This agility addresses the need for greater time to market for complex E-commerce application deployments by customers.”

Many application environments can benefit from VFrame DC including: Web Tier such as Apache and IIS, Oracle 11i application suite, SAP R3, BEA Weblogic, IBM Websphere, Oracle 10G RAC, multi-server clustered applications, grid based applications, and large dynamic development and test environments.

VFrame DC has been tested with leading server platforms including servers from Dell, HP, and IBM; leading storage platforms including products from EMC, HDS, HP, IBM, and NetApp; the two top data center operating systems including Linux and Microsoft Windows Server, and several business-level monitoring and middleware platforms including products from TIBCO and Cisco Application Networking Services (ANS).

Cisco also announced at a press conference today its vision for next generation data centers, called Data Center 3.0, which 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. VFrame DC is an important step in delivering this vision. For more information on that news please visit http://newsroom.cisco.com.