Come August ’07 and Cisco would launch VFrame Data Center Appliance. A Data Center 3.0 strategy as they call it. For the first time network would be way to provision Business Services swiftly thru an end-to-end view of data center elements – servers, storage, I/O, firewalls etc. also leveraging data center trends like virtualization and consolidation.
Further avoiding silo approach to provision new business services.
Better explained -
“Say you want to add one server to a Web farm. You have to ask a system administrator to rack a new server and load the OS and application. Then you have to contact the network team and ask for Ethernet connectivity for the server, put it in a VLAN [virtual LAN] and set up the appropriate IP addresses.
Then if you have storage connectivity for the server, you have to talk to a storage administrator and arrange storage for the new server, so that gets provisioned. If it’s in a Web tier, then you have to interface with load balancers and firewalls.
The VFrame brings a greater level of automation to that process by sending parallel commands to those elements to configure them. “It is process automation, in some sense.”
Something like this perhaps largely depends on vendors using VFrame API’s to make provisioning easier, and that is likely to happen.
Cheers!
Uttam
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