7/30/2007 -- Last week, Cisco Systems Inc. unveiled its ambitious take on the data center of the future: Data Center 3.0, which Cisco bills as nothing less than a strategy to transform enterprise data centers. One component of that announcement was VFrame Data Center, an orchestration platform that can dynamically provision and allocate resources together as virtualized services.

Analysts like what they see in VFrame Data Center, which they say promises to reduces application deployment times, improve overall resource utilization and offer improved business agility.

"[T]he company's approach to data center virtualization closes the gap between systems and business processes by reaching downstream into server, storage, and network resources while reaching upward into enterprise applications via Web services interfaces," said Brad Shimmin, a principal analyst for application infrastructure with consultancy Current Analysis.

VFrame Data Center is an important technology vision for Cisco, even if it takes the networking giant somewhat far afield from its bread-and-butter network hardware and services segments, Shimmin said.

"[Cisco] needed to clearly demonstrate its emerging role within the modern data center as a provider of a unified fabric [i.e., orchestration platform] upon which software manufacturers can build fabric-aware solutions capable of being provisioned according to service level agreements," he said. "Hitting the ground running, Cisco has already established compatibility with and support for numerous server and storage platforms as well as demonstrated interoperability with TIBCO's ActiveMatrix middleware monitoring solution."

In this respect, Shimmin concluded, Cisco's VFrame Data Center vision should help shake up the SOA market.

"[This market] is aggressively perusing opportunities to improve application performance, lower hardware costs and shrink deployment times through virtualization," he said. "To date, most solutions have centered upon application server and operating system virtualization. By partnering with Cisco or simply supporting VFrame DC, these vendors [such as BEA, IBM, Oracle, Sun and TIBCO] will be able to extend their reach down into data center hardware -- a necessary step for solutions aiming to enable reactive provisioning." --Stephen Swoyer