Cisco

Cisco’s John McCool Talks Virtualization

July 11, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

NetworkWorld published a great interview yesterday with John McCool, senior VP of data center, switching and security at Cisco. McCool sees a great future for virtualization around the company’s most successful product in its entire history, the Catalyst 6500 (and its successor, the Nexus 7000 Series, which was recently unveiled), combined with its own forray into virtualizing the data center with its Data Center 3.0 initiative.

A small excerpt:

What other areas are investment priorities?

Virtualizing services in the branch by centralizing those services in the data center. That’s a trend that’s here to stay. [Application Control Engine] and applications embedded into the network infrastructure would be another area that we’ll continue to drive very heavily.

Do you plan to take virtualization above the network to the server or application level?

You see a component of that already in Unified I/O. So the I/O component, really virtualizing that over a single connection to the network, is very fundamental. And then being able to split that out further in the networking device. That’s getting ingrained in the architecture of the data center, very much touching the connection to the server itself.

Do you plan to invest in another hypervisor vendor, similar to your relationship with VMware?

No announcements to date. We’re continuing to work with all the hypervisor vendors. We are interested in virtualized data centers and to the extent that hypervisor and virtualized servers exist in the data center we think that’s a very powerful construct for customers and one that’s going to take network support.

Read the rest of the interview here.

[Source: Cisco Blogs]

Cisco Systems

Cisco Talks Up Data Center 3.0 Initiative, Wants To “Demistify Virtualization”

June 24, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

Cisco Systems today announced updates to several of its key products to accelerate applications in Data Center 3.0, Cisco’s vision for a virtualized data center tied together by a unified network fabric.

Today’s announcements at Cisco Live also featured new tools and training to help networking professionals master the complexity of virtualized data centers. In essence, the company is rolling out a host of software and services designed to expand what data center administrators can do with virtualization.

“Real-time collaborative applications, energy concerns and the need to achieve greater efficiency from assets are driving IT managers to transform their data centers through new technologies,” said John McCool, senior vice president and general manager, Cisco Data Center, Switching and Services Group, and co-chair of the Cisco EcoBoard . “By providing virtualization technologies across the data center, Cisco aims to help businesses achieve the agility and resiliency they need to compete on a global scale.”

Where’s the beef, you ask?

The announcements coming out of Cisco include the release of the company’s WAAS (Wide Area Application Services) software version 4.1, which offers virtualized application hosting services, application acceleration and video deliver for branch offices, and Cisco’s VFrame Data Center release 1.2 for infrastructure provisioning with Cisco’s ACE (Application Control Engine) and VMware’s ESX Server software.

In addition, Cisco is releasing version 3.1 of ACE for the ACE 4710 application switch, which offers up to 4 gigabits-per-second of throughput. The company also is announcing the Cisco Data Center 3.0 professional programs and services for support customers and partners with data center deployments. Included in the services offerings is Cisco’s new Data Center Efficiency Program, part of the company’s Data Center Assurance Program 4.0, a Web-based tool that enables users to analyze power use in the data center and identify power and cooling technologies most useful in their facilities.

WAAS 4.1, VFrame 1.2 and the ACE Appliance will be available in the third quarter.

[Source: The Register]

Cisco And EMC To Merge?

May 19, 2008 by Robin Wauters 5 Comments

We love rumors. This time, it’s not about EMC selling off its majority stake in VMware to say, Intel. President and chief editor of TMC, Rich Tehrani, is throwing another sweet-sounding one into the air: an upcoming merger between Cisco and EMC.

“If you are Cisco, it makes sense to pick up EMC now because the stock is down a bit and moreover Cisco would be able to immediately expand its product line beyond networking, telepresence and networking.

Overnight, Cisco could become a leader in storage and a very strong security player.

Remember that Cisco was an early VMware investor and they likely want to expand their ownership of the company.

Remember also that Cisco is doing some amazing things with virtualization in their routers and owning a premiere name in the virtualization space can only help their core offerings.”

What do you think? Any possibility this particular rumor might come through? Or total BS?

Let us know in comments!

Motorola Joins Investors Behind VirtualLogix (Update)

April 21, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

According to PC World, Motorola has joined Cisco, Intel and Texas Instruments in funding mobile virtualization company VirtualLogix (see our previous coverage). Update: the official release went over the wire.

VirtualLogix lets a user access two separate operating systems on the same handset with its VLX for Mobile Handsets product line – allowing them to share some resources like memory, but also keeping other areas, such as applications, securely apart.

Today, the company plans to announce that Motorola is a new investor in the company. Motorola is interested in VirtualLogix primarily for its mobile phones, but has also expressed an interest in using it for virtualization in its network equipment, reportedly said Peter Richards, CEO of VirtualLogix.

More when the official announcement comes in!

Update: the official word is in, but doesn’t provide much more details. Motorola made the equity investment through Motorola Ventures, its strategic capital arm, without disclosing the size of the investment.

Motorola joins VirtualLogix’s current investors Atlas Venture, Cisco Systems, DFJ Esprit, Index Ventures, Intel Capital and Texas Instruments. The company raised $16 million in series B last July, and got an extra (undisclosed) equity investment from Texas Instruments last December. The total amount invested in the company so far is $28 million, and the company says it is open to more strategic investors joining the club.

Noteworthy, however, is the comment that was added by our media contact, which shows Motorola’s ambition:

“Motorola is rising to the challenge of competing against competitors like the iPhone to develop disruptive new handsets, that will be less expensive to develop, while providing a much richer user experience. Virtualization can give one phone two different personalities, making it possible to switch between work functionality and fun applications, even between plans and accounts on one device.”

[Source: SMS Text News]

Cisco APX, Network Virtualization The Right Way?

April 17, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Selena Frye over at TechRepublic talks about an interesting technology from Cisco called APX (Application eXtension Platform), made up of a hardware card, modified Linux software that runs on the card and a program for software developers.

The AXP is a card that goes into your Cisco router and that card runs a hardened version of Linux, customized by Cisco. So, you aren’t running Linux on your current Cisco router CPU, RAM, and Flash or in the IOS. You are running Linux on a card that is inserted into the router.

Once you have this card and the Linux OS, you can then run third-party applications on that platform. Think about that for a minute. What if you could run a protocol analyzer like Ethereal or an IPS like SNORT “in your router?” What if you could run WAN Compression, performance monitoring, and network management software ‘in your router?” Wow — that would be amazing!

The AXP card, a standard network module (NME) or AIM card, goes in the Cisco ISR Routers (1841, 2800, and 3800 series) and has its own memory, CPU, and Flash HD (and GB Ethernet in the case of the NME). As for the specs:

AXP has its own Linux CLI, error messages, debugging, and virtualization capabilities. It can run applications in various languages — C, Python, Perl, Java. You can even read and write router configuration through APIs and receive info about the status of the router. An application running in the AXP could know if the router was taking errors on the serial interface.

IBM / Cisco Eyeing Acquisition of Citrix?

April 9, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Good thing we have a ‘Rumors’ category to assign to this type of speculations: several news outlets are running a story about Citrix possibly being an acquisition target for Cisco or IBM.

A late April fool, or plausible?

Nasdaq traders bid up Citrix stock Tuesday on takeover rumors that have either IBM or Cisco purchasing the application delivery vendor.

Citrix’s stock went from a low of $30.60 Tuesday to a high of $33.75. Rumors of Citrix being purchased fueled the higher trading prices, says Jeffrey Gaggin, an enterprise software analyst for Avian Securities. Gaggin cautions that he has no way of knowing whether the rumors hold any truth.

But it would make sense for IBM or Cisco to purchase Citrix because Citrix’s acquisition of XenSource last year made it a strong player in the virtualization market, Gaggin says.

TheStreet adds the following financial analysis:

But even at what seems like a bargain price, Citrix isn’t cheap: With a market cap of $6 billion and expected revenue growth of 17% to $1.63 billion this year, the stock could command a fair premium, taking the potential buyout price north of $7 billion, assuming a premium of 15%.

IDC analyst Stephen Elliot sees some rationale for IBM and Cisco to go after Citrix. IBM could make the XenSource hypervisor its preferred brand and could better compete against VMware and Microsoft. This would run counter to H-P’s strategy, which has professed to being indifferent on the hypervisor question, Elliot said.

On Citrix’s side, IBM would lend “a lot more credibility” to the XenSource virtualization platform and provide development resources. “There are a lot of opportunities,” Elliot said.

[Source: ChannelWeb]