While at its Networkers conference in Anaheim, CA, Cisco announced its roadmap plan, calling it - "Data Center 3.0". The funny thing is, I just got used to living in the "Data Center 2.0" era described to me some six or so months ago. My how these things fly! I half expect someone to declare Data Center 4.0 by the end of the year... ok, perhaps 3.5. In any case, part of this announcement from Cisco included the While at its Networkers conference in Anaheim, CA, Cisco announced its roadmap plan, calling it – “Data Center 3.0”. The funny thing is, I just got used to living in the “Data Center 2.0” era described to me some six or so months ago. My how these things fly! I half expect someone to declare Data Center 4.0 by the end of the year… ok, perhaps 3.5. In any case, part of this announcement from Cisco included the introduction to its VFrame Data Center (VFrame DC), an orchestration platform that leverages network intelligence to provision resources together as virtualized services. Cisco claims this 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.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. “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, Senior Vice President, Data Center, Switching and Security Technology Group, Cisco. “This agility addresses the need for greater time to market for complex E-commerce application deployments by customers.” Cisco VFrame Data Center components include: Cisco VFrame Data Center Appliance: Central controller that connects to Ethernet and Fibre Channel networks Cisco VFrame Data Center GUI: Java-based client that accesses application running on VFrame Data Center Appliance Cisco VFrame Web Services Interface and Software Development Kit: Programmable interface that allows scripting of actions for Cisco VFrame Data Center Cisco VFrame Host Agent: Host agent that provides server heartbeat, capacity utilization metrics, shutdown, and other capabilities Cisco VFrame Data Center Macros: Open interface that allows administrators to create custom provisioning actions The technology, while impressive, isn’t new. Back in 2005, Cisco purchased the Mountain View, CA company Topspin for $250 million. Topspin focused on server fabric switches providing a high performance, programmable infrastructure for grid and utility computing, clustered enterprise applications, and server virtualization. With virtualization becoming the “next best thing” in IT, what better time to dust off this technology and reintroduce it to the market. VFrame DC is an important component to help Cisco reach its vision for the next generation datacenter which includes the real-time, dynamic orchestration of infrastructure services from shared pools of virtualized server, storage and network resources, and optimizing application service-levels, efficiency and collaboration. Software Development