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Cisco enhances its virtualization portfolio
By Saheer Karimbayil
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Thursday, 17 July 2008, 14:19 IST
Bangalore: When it comes to virtualization the first issue to be addressed is the awareness on this concept. Most of the people are still very much cautious about going for a sudden transformation towards virtualization as they think it will result in losing their control over the data or whole business they run. Though Cisco knows this fact, the U.S. based IT player with special interest in networking is expanding its Datacenter 3.0 initiative in India, with an announcement of new products and professional services that will help customers virtualize datacenters for greater operational and energy efficiency. The offerings make the virtual network an efficient platform to deliver datacenter services.
Though the space is at its nascent stage John McCool, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cisco Datacenter, Switching and Services Group, and co-chair of the Cisco EcoBoard is confident with the new initiative of the company. "Real-time collaborative applications, energy concerns and the need to achieve greater efficiency from assets are driving IT managers to virtualize their datacenters," he says.
One of the announcement made by the company in line with the new initiative is Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) software release 4.1, which offers virtualized application hosting services, application acceleration and video delivery for a branch office. Another one is Cisco Application Control Engine (ACE) software release 3.1 for the ACE 4710 application switch, offering up to 4 gigabits per second (Gbps) of throughput and up to 2 Gbps of compression capability. Cisco VFrame Datacenter software release 1.2 offers infrastructure provisioning with Cisco ACE and VMware ESX. Cisco also announced Datacenter 3.0 professional programs and services to support customers with datacenter deployments.
On how these technologies will help businesses achieve the agility and resiliency required to compete on a global scale, Sumit Mukhija, national sales manager, data centre, Cisco India and SAARC, said, "By virtualising the resources of a data centre, an enterprise can offer services across the globe from a single centralized data centre, thereby reducing operational cost and increasing asset effectiveness."
Last month there was a report from the datacentre market specialist BroadGroup saying that the India datacenter market is experiencing substantial growth and will reach more than $1.5 billion in value by 2010. When thinking about the expense that will go with implementing the required infrastructure, there is a great scope for virtualization of datacenters. However, as any IT firm who are into virtualization, the company also wants to transform the space from the nascent stage to a mature segment. To reach such a stage, awareness on implementation of virtualization based technology is the need of the hour.
