For its part, Cisco might not be too happy with what I'm written above, which seemingly dumbs down what they've accomplished into a "data center for idiots" approach. Honestly, that's not my intention or my perception, though it is an easy, reductionist way to present its positioning in the market.
To dive deeper into some of the nuances surrounding UCS, I spoke recently with John McCool, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's Data Center, Switching, and Services Group. He provided some interesting perspective. I was particularly interested in the insight on how UCS enables easier management of virtualized resources. We also touched on how network resources are going to be sucked up more by video bandwidth requirements, and what that means. Here's an excerpt from our talk:
InformationWeek: What's the big challenge?
John McCool: A data center architecture, which can host multiple applications and can scale up or down across the infrastructure. The unified compute, unified infrastructure, and unified fabric approach we're taking allows that first step.
As companies look at that they say, OK, now I can move virtual machines and virtual workloads across a vast array of x86 resource. How am I going to move that from a set of machines [to] across the network or maybe across infrastructure as a service, across the cloud? That's when they understand this is really a networking problem.
We've introduced new technologies like Cisco Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV), which allows virtual machines to move across multiple data centers. So you can start to envision moving your workload between two sites using that technology for disaster recovery, or in the future being able to move those workloads to a service provider that's providing hosted services.
InformationWeek: What are the pain points?
McCool: We're seeing customers who have done a lot of virtualization. Now they're struggling with how to get control over that virtualized environment. Then they want to know how to take advantage of it terms of future movement and further optimization. They've reached kind of a plateau.
InformationWeek: Let's look at the network future. There's going to be a step-function increase in demand because of video. This will require smarter software, more analysis of packets, and more decision making. It's like a new take on the old cliche; it's not your father's router anymore, correct?
McCool: You're absolutely right. I think what you're trying to capture here is, it's not just about how fast things move through the pipe. It's the amount of processing and intelligence on top of that. What's happening is, additional technologies are converging on these networks--security, wireless integration, policy. This does require more processing; either more traditional compute-type processing on packets or hardware-based processing.
