8/17/2010 -- Earlier this year, Cisco Systems Inc. teamed up with VMWare Inc. and NetApp to promote SMDA, or Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture (SMDA).

In plain English, Cisco and its partners trumpeted a pre-certified, secure, available and resilient architecture for hosting virtual data centers in the public cloud.

Late last month, the duo fleshed out this partnership, trumpeting what they're calling an industry first -- a "certified" end-to-end Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) solution for VMware environments.

Why FCoE? Or, more to the point, why end-to-end FCoE for VMWare?

The chief benefit of such a topology is that it enables VMWare shops to reduce the number of devices or cables they have to use as part of their data center consolidation efforts.

To help illustrate the benefits of end-to-end FCoE, Cisco and its partners solicited supporting statements from a trio of different technology integrators.

"[The] certification...is significant for our customers who are demanding an end to the complexity and headaches associated with a myriad of cables, multiple interface cards and switches," said Bob Olwig, vice president of  corporate business development with World Wide Technology, an integrator that specializes in data center virtualization and automation efforts.

It's a key milestone for Cisco, VMWare and NetApp. Just seven months ago, the trio unveiled SMDA, which they billed as a kind of out-of-the-box public cloud data center.

SDMA helps isolate and secure IT resources and applications between business units, departments or other entities in a shared cloud computing environment.

The SMDA schema is based on a Cisco Validated Design reference architecture and uses a mix of technologies, including Cisco's Nexus Series Switches and Unified Computing System (UCS), NetApp's MultiStore-based FAS storage appliances, VMware's vSphere cloud operating system and vShield Zones virtual firewall.

At the time, officials positioned the effort as nothing less than a turnkey virtual datacenter -- for the otherwise untamed public cloud. "Our joint vision with NetApp and VMware centers on delivering a unified architecture for customers to design and build a complete, virtualized datacenter that will streamline operations and improve their business resilience," said Tony Bates, Cisco's senior vice president and GM, in a statement.

Cisco and its partners appear to have their work cut out for them. Enterprises are increasingly enthusiastic about cloud computing -- in a private, or internal context. Public cloud schemes are a tougher sell. A recent market forecast from International Data Corp. projects that demand for cloud computing products or services will generate nearly $6.5 billion in server hardware spending by 2014.

That's almost double 2009's tally, according to IDC. But the bulk of this demand will be on the private cloud side of the aisle: IDC expects that the share of server hardware sales generated by public cloud activity will increase by just under 25 percent over the next four years.

During the same period, server hardware sales generated by private cloud activity will more than double, spiking from $2.6 billion in 2009 to $5.7 billion in 2014. That's a growth spurt of 120 percent.

What's more, nearly half (44 percent) of respondents in a separate IDC survey said that they're considering private cloud efforts.
-By Stephen Swoyer