Cisco Beefs Up Cloud Computing Push
December 6, 2011
Cisco Systems on Tuesday unveiled what it’s calling a “framework” for building big data centers, letting potential customers know how they can use various Cisco products together–and hopefully leading to more sales of its equipment.
The products in the announcement are largely things that Cisco already sells. But now Cisco is laying out a vision for using them to better manage information across data centers.
“For a long time we’ve provided individual components,” said Padmasree Warrior, Cisco’s chief technology officer, who issued a blog post on the announcement. “What we are doing now is bringing these sets of products together.”…
In part because everything related to the Internet these days has to riff on the word “cloud,” Cisco is calling its new effort CloudVerse. Within a single data center, it includes Cisco’s unified server and networking system and other networking gear. Where the San Jose, Calif., company is trying to stand apart from the other technology makers who sell data-center equipment is technology that helps coordinate between multiple data centers.
If one data center is running at capacity, the Cisco technology makes it easy to move some of that traffic to a different one. Right now, that kind of redistribution usually only happens within a single data center.
“You put it together it is a more complete cloud infrastructure picture than a lot of the other technology companies have today,” said Melanie Posey, an analyst at research company IDC.
Not surprisingly, Warrior said that the whole thing works better when customers buy all the components from Cisco. Where some data-center operators try to use low-cost hardware, she said that approach really works best with simple tasks, such as running a single application. More complicated data centers that run multiple programs require hardware and software like Cisco’s that are designed to work together, she said.