Cisco's Role in VMware's VDC-OS

Las Vegas, September 17 -- I managed to catch up with Ed Bugnion, CTO of the Server Access and Virtualization Business Unit at Cisco to get a little deeper dive on the announcement made in conjunction with VMware's VDC-OS, the centerpiece of the company's VMworld liftoff and the architecture and roadmap for the next generation data center.

Central to this is a new set of capabilities (not a product) called VN-Link. Explaining it would take far more time than I seem to have at the moment (it's a bit of a hall of mirrors) so I'll save that for another blog. But VN-Link the is foundation for a new product called the Nexus 1000V which is a networking linchpin of VDC-OS. The product was jointly developed with VMware and is slated for availability in 1HO9. Interestingly, when Bugnion announced at his keynote that it was the "the first third party ESX switch", there was an almost startling moment of spontaneous applause.

A few other interesting data points. Bugnion told me it was basically Cisco's first software-only switch. Second, Cisco has a WAN optimization product called WAAS which is likely to have an important role to play in VMware's vCloud initiative which will depend on robust communication links in geographically dispersed data centers (i.e. the Internal Cloud) as well as connecting to the federated Cloud that Paul Maritz addressed in his opening keynote on Tuesday. He revealed that Nexus, Catalyst, vSAN, and application delivery product lines will all feed into VDC-OS development going forward.

Posted by Tom Valovic on 09/17/2008 at 12:49 PM