Cisco's New Data Center Architecture Unifies Network Services

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By now, you're probably familiar with unified computing and unified fabric. Now, get ready for unified network services. Enterprise Networking Planet looks at Cisco's plans to deliver a new approach for data center architectures while updating Nexus and UCS.

Networking giant Cisco today is unveiling two components of what it positions as a new architectural approach for delivering virtual network services across an enterprise IT infrastructure.

Called Cisco Unified Network Services, the new offerings join Cisco's existing efforts to improve the flexibility and manageability of increasingly complex enterprise data center networks: unified fabric, which melds Fibre Channel and Ethernet, and the Unified Computing System (UCS), a server system.

Alongside the Unified Network Services launch today, Cisco is also bulking up its product lineup with new UCS servers and Nexus switch models.

With Cisco Unified Network Services, the goal is to deliver service consistency and responsiveness while providing flexibility and choice for enterprises, Shashi Kiran, director for data center virtualization marketing at Cisco, told InternetNews.com.

"For us, the vision of Unified Network Services in the data center is very simple," Kiran said. "We want to be able to take any network service, deliver it in any form factor -- virtual, physical, it shouldn't matter -- and for any platform, whether it's an enterprise network or a cloud platform, and to do it in a consistent way."

One of the two new Unified Network Services offerings is the Cisco virtual security gateway, which is a zone-based firewall that can enable admins to separate different areas of an enterprise network. The gateway can provide policy granularity on a per-virtual-machine basis, where security policies can be dynamically allocated even as the virtual machines move around the network, Kiran said.

"There is a lot of workload mobility happening with virtualization, and with this solution, we're in a position to keep the security profiles and policies consistent in dynamic environments," he said.

Read the rest of "Cisco Unifies Network Services With New Data Center Architecture" at Enterprise Networking Planet