Cisco announcement of virtualization and orchestration of networks and services
[There is a lot of buzz and excitement around virtualization and orchestration of networks and related services such as storage, computation, etc. Orchestration allows end users to configure and link together these virtualized services. This of course, has something we have been promoting with UCLP for some time now (www.uclp.ca or www.inocybe.ca). UCLP uses web services and grid technology for the virtualizations and BPEL for the orchestration. Some excerpts from Grid Today-- BSA]
http://www.gridtoday.com/grid/1684997.html
Cisco Takes On Virtualization Orchestration
Cisco announced today VFrame Data Center (VFrame DC), an orchestration platform that leverages network intelligence to provision resources together as virtualized services. This industry-first approach greatly reduces application deployment times, improves overall resource utilization and offers greater business agility. Further, VFrame DC includes an open API, and easily integrates with third party management applications, as well as best-of-breed server and storage virtualization offerings.
With VFrame DC, customers can now link their compute, networking and storage infrastructures together as a set of virtualized services. This services approach provides a simple yet powerful way to quickly view all the services configured at the application level to improve troubleshooting and change management. VFrame DC offers a policy engine for automating resource changes in response to infrastructure outages and performance changes. Additionally, these changes can be controlled by external monitoring systems via integration with the VFrame DC Web services application programming interface (API).
VFrame DC is a highly efficient orchestration platform for service provisioning which requires only a single controller and one back-up controller. The real time provisioning engine has a comprehensive view of compute, storage and network resources. This view enables VFrame DC to provision resources as virtualized services using graphical design templates. These design templates comprise one of four VFrame DC modular components: design, discovery, deploy and operations. These components are integrated together with a robust security interface that allows controlled access by multiple organizations.
Many application environments can benefit from VFrame DC, including: Web tier such as Apache and IIS; Oracle 11i application suite; SAP R3; BEA Weblogic; IBM Websphere; Oracle 10G RAC; multi-server clustered applications; grid-based applications; and large dynamic development and test environments.
Cisco also announced at a press conference today its vision for next-generation datacenters, called Data Center 3.0, which entails the real-time, dynamic orchestration of infrastructure services from shared pools of virtualized server, storage and network resources, while optimizing application service-levels, efficiency and collaboration. VFrame DC is an important step in delivering this vision.
Additional information and resources on Cisco VFrame DC can be found at http://newsroom.cisco.com/networkersUS/2007/.