http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090120/bs_nm/us_cisco_servers_1

“The Cisco Nexus 1000V distributed virtual switch, with Cisco’s VN-Link virtual-machine-aware network and storage services, will complement VMware Infrastructure, which is in use by more than 120,000 customers. Through this integrated virtual solution, information technology (IT) managers will be able to set and enforce connection policies for each virtual machine across a data center. Now the same policy-based configuration and operation of network services traditionally available in Cisco physical hardware switches will be easily applied to each virtual machine. These virtual capabilities will enable IT managers to more easily manage virtual machines as they migrate them across physical servers during routine hardware maintenance or to balance server workloads for optimized application performance and availability.”

http://www.vmware.com/technology/virtual-datacenter-os/

We will see no doubt….

@Don Draper – thanks and good point. A WaaS module supporting Hyper-V could take a bite out of Riverbed’s marketshare.

@Tarry – thanks and good thoughts!

@Douglas Gourlay – okay, what are you announcing? :)

@Clint Sharp – I agree that the Cisco MIPS CPUs are “ridiculously underpowered” to run a VM environment. This is exactly why I suggested that the aggregation of hardware and software in a Cisco/VMware hardware/software configuration would be painful to folks trying to leverage the economics of the Intel x86 architecture. As evidenced by what you are saying, Cisco has a hard time keeping their processor technology up to date already, so I doubt they would be able to keep pace with the nimble and fast-paced server market.

Since I am quite a bit off base, I’ll have to assume my prediction is far too ambitious – which is a shame as I think that if my prediction was true it would put Cisco back in the center stage for the enterprise data center…

Clint

Nice idea though!

dg

Good to see you surface up once in a while on Om’s site :-)

Now to the rumor:

Cisco will indeed declare its much awaited entry into not only the Data Center but also into the Cloud market. Citrix on he other hand, which you will see soon, will use another angle to talk about the same. From the technology perspective it is the deep desire of the likes of Cisco and others to move into the “immediate adjacent markets”.

Cisco’s move will open up the market for others vendors like Vyatta (which in my opinion with their Virtual Appliances) have more of a chance to be placed whereever in the geographically dispersed cloud (primary, secondary, staging, dvelopment etc), than the others. It will also give more room to the other network vendors, and indeed as other vendors who are proliferating towards the “Complete GDM-aware” model such as the likes of IBM, HP, Dell will feel the heat as well although Cisco may have struggles of its own get relevant in those markets.

So basically whether Cisco does what it will do or not, one thing is for sure:

o Market consolidation will accelerate. (Expect bigger M&As)
o Lots of outsiders too are getting interested in it lately.(Steel Biggies, Investment Firms, etc)
o More need for open markets will arise, enlarging the pie only more for the Cloud Computing market.