Cisco VFrame

Cisco Virtualizes Network Services with VFrame

The VFrame Data Center (VFrame DC) is a software/hardware platform that, seeking to whittle down the number of physical devices in corporate data centers, provisions services with the simple acts of point-and-click. Cisco is branding this as part of their Data Center 3.0 movement.

VFrame DC virtualizes network services with an 1U appliance and is stateless. This leads to the liberating ability to move services between servers and change the identity of each machine in a rapid, ad-hoc fashion.

“We are not the virtualization engine of the datacenter; we are a middleware platform that can provision the networking components and work with these other endpoint systems,” said Project Manager Bill Erdman of Cisco's datacenter technology group, during an interview with Internet News.

Cisco and VMware buddy up for VFrame Data CenterCisco and VMware buddy up for VFrame Data Center

Using VMware ESX Server capacity on demand, Cisco aims to give the provisioning of physical resources a kick in the pants to meet the speed of provisioning on virtual machines

The integration allows the VFrame to load VMware ESX Server onto bare-metal computer hardware — something that previously could only be done with Windows and Linux — and configure the network and storage connections that ESX needs. The two vendors snuggled close to create a two-way policy API (based on SOAP and XML) to coordinate the configuration.

Cisco claims the VFrame can load ESX Server onto physical hardware from a SAN in under 10 minutes. The VFrame also automatically configures the SAN back-end, including SAN fabrics and shared LUNs (logical unit numbers), based on predefined design templates.

The VFrame is a 1U appliance that links compute, storage and network resources as virtualized network services.

Cisco preps for virtualized 'Data Center 3.0'
"Because the network is uniquely positioned to be the platform for the data center, we are investing in innovations to help our customers transform their data centers for improved efficiency and increased business productivity," said Cisco CEO John Chambers.

VFrame DC is a 1U appliance that links compute, storage and network resources as virtualized network services. It offers a point and click UI and a policy engine that allows for automated resource changes in response to outages and performance flux. Additionally, such changes can be controlled by external monitoring systems, thanks to integration with a VFrame DC web services application programming interface.

For example, an administrator could use VFrame to deal with a sudden spike in traffic on a web server. The admin could set up a policy to automatically provision a new web server if the number of requests passed a certain level. Alternatively, the appliance could be used to reconfigure servers to handle different tasks depending on the time of day.

"VFrame Data Center offers unprecedented orchestration within the data center network, for dynamically re-programming server, storage and network resources into agile application services," said Jayshree Ullal, Cisco's Data Center senior veep. "This agility addresses the need for greater time to market for complex E-commerce application deployments by customers."