9/21/2010 -- Cisco last week unveiled Unified Network Services (UNS), a combined hardware, software and services offering that Cisco hopes will help burnish its data center bona-fides.

The UNS announcement coincided with a new addition to Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS) portfolio -- the UCS B230 M1 Blade Server -- along with several new Unified Fabric enhancements, including the Nexus 5548 switch.

Cisco positions UNS as -- in effect -- a shrink-wrapped network services offering. To wit: Cisco promises "to deliver any network service in any environment and in any form factor." Prospective offerings include load-balancing, security and application monitoring/performance management, just to name a few.

Officials position UNS as the latest strike in Cisco's ambitious data center push, which effectively kicked off last year with the announcement of UCS. Concomitant with the UNS unveiling, officials touted the value of Cisco's "Data Center Business Advantage" architectural framework.

"Cisco's new Unified Network Services and the innovations across the Unified Fabric and Unified Computing portfolios demonstrate our ability to deliver solutions designed to meet the dynamic needs of the modern data center," said John McCool, senior vice-president of Cisco's Data Center, Switching and Services Group, in a prepared release.

Cisco's first dedicated UNS offerings are the Virtual Security Gateway (VSG) and the virtual Wide Area Application Services (vWAAS).

Cisco describes the former offering as a "virtual appliance" that's designed to apply VM-level security policies "within and across VLANS and shared compute infrastructures in the data center." It's currently implemented in software on Cisco's Nexus 1000V switch. Cisco's vWAAS offering runs in a VM context (powered by VMWare's ESX/ESXi hypervisor) on top of either Cisco's own Unified Computing System (UCS) servers or on top of third-party hardware. Cisco positions it as a "cloud-ready WAN optimization solution" that's designed to accelerate "application delivery from private and virtual private cloud infrastructure, to ensure an optimal user experience."

Elsewhere, Cisco says its new Nexus 5548 switch enhances Unified Fabric by delivering two times the port density in a footprint that's similar in size to existing Unified Fabric switches. Cisco also announced the Nexus Fabric Extender 2224TP -- which it says "provides alternative deployment options for customers with low server density per rack" -- and the Catalyst 6513-E chassis, which boasts a switching capacity in excess of 2 Terabits.
--By Stephen Swoyer