Bangkok--29 Mar--PC & Associates Consulting
Cisco Systems’ innovations in storage networking are helping end-users to address the challenges in today’s dynamic business environment. In an update to the media in Bangkok today, Cisco said that organizations are looking to evolve their data center infrastructures to meet three goals: reduced operating expenditures, ability to respond rapidly to changes in the business and technology environments, and to keep up with both regulatory and best practice demands on business continuance.
“Cisco’s Intelligent Information Network vision provides a foundation for organizations to evolve their data centers in three phases to achieve those goals. The three goals are Consolidation, Virtualization and Automation,” said Shankar Subramanian, Technical Director, Storage Networking, Asia Pacific, Cisco Systems.
In the first phase, the Consolidation of the front-end data networking and back-end storage networking infrastructures. The glue that ties this all together is a common set of intelligent services across the front-end data network and the back-end storage network. These services include security, quality of service (QoS), availability and manageability.
“By integrating intelligent services across the entire data and storage networking infrastructure, organizations can benefit from administrative efficiency which is the most important factor in lowering total cost of ownership (TCO). Greater productivity, resulting from an integrated, intelligent information network, results in significant TCO reductions,” said Subramanian.
The next phase is the Virtualization of the data center. The virtualization phase enables enterprises to reduce cost of ownership, improve resilience, and increase the agility of both the network infrastructure and the data center overall. Cisco has begun this process with innovations such as virtual local area networking (VLAN), virtual storage area networking (VSAN), and multi-protocol label switching (MPLS). Cisco is also beginning to virtualize integrated intelligent services. For example, virtualization on the firewall service module for the Catalyst 6500 can support one hundred separate instances of firewalls on a single physical infrastructure. It enables cost-effective firewall services between any two applications or application tiers. This capability leads to better infrastructure utilization while reducing capital expenditure.
The final phase is automation. This emphasizes technology to improve operational efficiencies by enabling easier provisioning, faster troubleshooting and recovery and self defense of the network and the resources hosted on the network. By taking a systems approach to the network, the network will be able to achieve higher levels of automation. An example of this is the Network Admission Control initiative, for ensuring that hosts with out-of-date patches and antivirus can be shunted to a separate non-production network.
Another very important aspect of automation is the ability to provide a standards-based interface to data center management frameworks and policy tools. This includes capabilities such as SMI-S based on CIM/XML protocols, easing the integration of the network into the complete infrastructure framework. This requires the network to provide an abstraction layer that simplifies the job of provisioning, monitoring and troubleshooting.
“Business continuance is an issue that all our customers in Thailand are grappling with. Cisco’s Intelligent Information Network vision and our storage networking solutions for the Data Center, combined with the solutions and services of our partners, provide a very compelling answer to this issue,” said Vatsun Thirapatarapong, Director for Business Development, Thailand, Cisco Systems.
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