Cisco touts connected data center approach to service providers

Telecom service providers not only run some of the world’s biggest data centers to support their own networks and services, but are increasingly offering virtualized, cloud-based data center solutions to large enterprise customers as well.

That combo makes them a key target for new data center technology launched today by Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) that aims to help big data centers better optimize their network and computing resources by more effectively linking disparate data center locations to share processing power.

Leading the announcement, which Cisco dubbed its Data Center 3.0 strategy, is new approach to linking data centers running Cisco Nexus 7000 Series switches. The solution, called Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV), enables data centers to dynamically allocate resources across multiple locations via gigabit speed Ethernet links. For many IT organizations, those wide area Ethernet links will delivered via be private IP networks, but the growth of carrier Ethernet services and high-speed, wide area IP/MPLS networks means service providers will certainly play a role in OTV as well – perhaps eventually offering OTV as a managed service offering in and of itself, said Craig Griffin, senior director of product management at Cisco.

“[OTV] can leverage an existing IP/MPLS network you might get from a service provider, and it also lets you leverage that network much more aggressively,” said Griffin, noting that at the same time many IT shops may opt to run OTV over their own wide area gigabit networks. “Technically, the way it works is to tunnel layer 3 or MAC traffic over an IP network. It can work over any IP network today, it just runs over the top of it, hence the name ‘overlay’.”

At its heart, ITV is a MAC routing scheme, with Ethernet frames encapsulated in IP packets and transported over any network that supports IP, including the Internet, private IP networks and carrier MPLS networks, Griffin said. The technology includes built-in features to make those mission-critical data center connections more resilient, including multi-pathing, multi-homing and loop prevention; it also automatically suppresses flooding of unknown Layer 2 traffic, ensuring that a network failure in one data center is isolated from other data center locations. Cisco OTV will be available in April; existing Nexus 7000 customers can deploy it via a software upgrade.

Given the role service providers could potentially play in OTV, it’s not surprising that Cisco touted several carriers among its early OTV users. Norway’s Telenor is planning to deploy OTV to consolidate 22 data centers down to four mega-centers that will be used to manage and fulfill customer services. Meanwhile, Australia’s Optus Networks and its Alphawest unit said it will use OTV to stitch together its enterprise cloud services with customer data centers at the layer 2 level, essentially creating a hybrid virtualized cloud computing environment.

In related news today, Cisco announced new 10G Base T support for its Catalyst and Nexus platforms; new Nexus 7000 X: I/O modules available in 8-port 10GbE and 48-port GE configurations; new support for Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) for cloud-based and SaaS applications; and support for Cisco Application Control Engine (ACE) for VMWare environments.