NETWORKING
TONY WALTHAM
Cisco's Andre Smit. |
When Cisco's regional data centre chief Andre Smit meets with CIOs he says all they want to talk about today is virtualisation.
"This is the concept that is driving the conversation today, not the data centre. They want to virtualise all their resources," he said.
But the problem is that virtualisation is breaking everything in the customer's environment. "It breaks policies that have taken 10 or 20 years to establish, it breaks all the management, it breaks security, processes and organisational structures.
"And at each level there are different management platforms, and they don't talk to each other," he said.
Then there was the fact that virtualisation meant something different to everybody, while within data centres there were silos of virtualisation - storage, computing resources (virtual machines), operating systems, the applications and the network (virtual LANs), Cisco Systems Asia Pacific data centre managing director said in an exclusive interview.
VMware was the thought leader here, according to Smit, while Microsoft, Oracle and SAP were doing a lot of work around applications; Cisco, meanwhile, had been working around the virtual network side.
While there was no clear leader today, Smit said that Cisco believed that networking was the one piece that would change all of this. "It touches every component," he pointed out.
"We can achieve this by putting intelligence into the network to enable the transparency of the entire environment, which is just about to go through a complete shift," he predicted.
Earlier this year, Cisco introduced its Unified Fabric and Nexus Series 7000 and Series 5000 data centre switches as part of its Data Centre 3.0 initiative.
Cisco has also "completely rewritten the 10Gbps Ethernet spec" to enable Data Centre Ethernet as well as providing Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) as an alternative to proprietary fibre channel connectivity to storage, both of which had won the approval of standards bodies, Smit said.
Today, every file server was connected to three or four different networks - two connections over fibre-channel to storage, then there was a backup SAN and tape drives. Then there were two connections with switches into the network, for redundancy, he noted.
This represented a massive explosion of connectivity and typically, every file server had five to eight connections, he observed.
"If a customer has 500, 1,000, 2,000 servers - and that happens very, very easily - you're talking about hundreds and thousands of connections to the networks, to completely different networks, different management systems, different infrastructure. None of these networks are connected to each other or talk to each other," Smit noted.
He explained how a team of senior engineers at Cisco had been tasked with looking at bringing intelligence to 10GB Ethernet switches connected to the file servers. Two to three years ago, four senior staff at Cisco - the chief of engineering and three heads of different business units - left to set up a company called Nuova Systems, along with one of the original architects at Sun Microsystems and a founder of VMware.
Three weeks ago, Cisco completed the acquisition of Nuova, bringing the company back in, he said, noting that if Cisco had tried to do this development work internally, it would have taken much longer.
Cisco also sees a huge shift away from proprietary fibre channel storage interconnect to FCoE in data centres and expects that FCoE, which has less than a one per cent share of the market today, will jump dramatically to "a double-digit market share in the next couple of months," Smit said.
But he noted that the transition from Fibre Channel to FCoE would not happen overnight, and would take some 18 months to two years.
Smit said that Cisco saw no competitors providing FCoE for now, where it had about a 12-month lead. "We are still waiting for the competitors to show up," he said.
Other benefits of FCoE are that it is faster: 10GBps compared to 8GBps for fibre channel, helps save power, is operable over greater distances while Ethernet skills are more widespread - and particularly within Cisco and its partners.
Smit said that Cisco's Unified Fabric architecture provided one network with two connections to the file server that connected to all the different networks, instead of to four different networks, so it collapsed it all into one cloud, where everything was connected to everything at the same time.
A good example, he said, was Microsoft, which was now supporting Grand Theft Auto online gaming on Xbox360 Live using the Nexus 7000 platform, which had taken just two weeks to deploy and as a result had saved on connections and on switching.
In the Asia Pacific region, five customers had signed up, including one of the biggest banks in China which was doing an end-to-end deployment, Smit said.
FCoE represented an entire architectural shift for customers, and coupled with Data Centre Ethernet and the correct architecture, Smit said it could lead to an eight per cent power saving - a considerable cost saving for data centres that typically consumed between two to five megawatts of power. It wasn't only data centres that needed to change; so did the channel, Smit said.
The regional data centre chief was in Bangkok the other day to address partners "who need to change their way of thinking," as did systems integrators "who need to change the way they went to market." Internally, every Cisco account manager had been re-educated over the past nine months while a new certification programme had been introduced.
Automation is key to Cisco's long-term vision. Cisco has a management overlay called VFrame Server Fabric Virtualisation software that had been developed internally for its own data centres before being released as a product and that was the first step to automation, he said. Smit revealed that Cisco itself was in the process of consolidating more than 50 data centres worldwide to just five, custom-built centres, with the first now up and running in Richardson, Texas. The other four will be in Sydney, Australia, Bangalore, India, Shanghai, China and San Jose', California.
Data centre spending worldwide now is $85 billion a year, and this is growing between 16 and 18 per cent, year on year, while in the Asia Pacific region the growth was 50 per cent and in Southeast Asia and Taiwan, this growth was up to 70 per cent, he said. The biggest growth of data centres has been in the Asia Pacific region, and the leaders had been large financial firms like CitiBank, JP Morgan and Merrill Lynch, which had just opened a Singapore facility with 3,000 employees, Smit said.
Spending money to save much more money over the longer-term was their goal, while the "sub-prime" mortgage crisis in the US had been one of the triggers for this worldwide - but moreso for Asia since many of these companies had moved their CTOs to Asia. Asia was were the growth was now and companies now tended to place a new data centre in Asia, building it from scratch.
Another driver of change had been the fact that most of the workforces that Cisco and its customers were hiring now were Web 2.0-savvy people, graduates who are familiar with the Web 2.0 user experience, along with social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and instant messaging.
"This forces our customers to re-engineer internally to provide a collaborative environment and interaction for their own employees and was triggered by customer needs to be more collaborative, and it was also moving to environments that offer access to data from any device, anywhere and at any time," he said, noting that "for Web 2.0, the data centre practice behind this had to be correct." Customers needed to change the way they did virtualisation, but this needed to be done on a step-by-step basis, or by taking "baby steps"... it was an evolution, rather than a pull out and replace exercise, and depended on the refresh cycles for different items of data centre equipment, he said.
Cisco was from six to nine months away from doing this in-house with its own network, completely automating it, while most customers were probably 18 months to two years away, he said.
The company was working closely with partners that included EMC, IBM, HP, Dell, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP in deploying Unified Fabric, virtual machines, HyperVisors and FCoE, he said, noting that Cisco would be entering new markets over the next six to nine months, "markets that we believe were moving too slowly where the customers were desperately crying out for something new. We are looking at a new way to connect servers ... new servers, whatever it's going to be, and we are doing this in partnership."
Going into a few specifics, he said that Cisco was entering into a very close partnership with VMware, "where we're doing a lot of product development for devices that can detect what's happening in software and putting it in hardware, in ASICs, for VMware. "So you'll see a lot of products coming out in the next three to six months with VMware and Cisco that's going to take their software and put it into hardware on Cisco appliances and devices," Smit said. And Cisco had also entered into a very close partnership with Microsoft in the application space, "where there's device we call a wide area acceleration box where we compete very strongly with companies like Riverbed.
"What we've just done with the whole next generation of these products is the customer has the ability to buy a device that sits in the customer's environment that connects to the wide area network. It's a Cisco device that's got all the Cisco software, networking, acceleration built into it, but also the customer can buy the Microsoft server licence that's going to run on that Cisco box. So instead of buying a separate file server to run Windows Server 2008, the customer is going to buy the licence, sitting on a Cisco device, to run Windows Server 2008 to run Windows Server 2008 services on the Cisco device in all their branch offices," he said, noting that this would ship around July, while the VMware products would probably arrive in the August to September timeframe.
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