Industry collaborates to simplify virtualisation

Virtualisation has hit a wall. It has become too complicated to manage how the networks are built, and how to gain access to tiered storage within a virtualised environment.

This is the view of Nic Rouhotas, consulting systems engineer for Cisco, discussing the partnership between Cisco, EMC, and VMware at a recent Cisco event. The partnership will converge the technologies of the participating companies to deliver next-generation virtualisation data centre infrastructure technologies.

The management of networks and storage in the virtualised environment needs some kind of glue to bring it all together, noted Rouhotas. “That glue comes in the form of vendor collaboration. Not only as an alliance, but as a convergence of joint technologies,” he offered.

Scalable virtualisation is what the partnership is working towards, explained Brett Ley, vertical solutions architect at Cisco. “Virtualisation is not new. Scalable virtualisation is what is new. In order to have end-to-end virtualisation in a scalable manageable way, we have to partner,” he explained.

Ley said: “This partnership allows us to implement virtualisation from the application server environment to the network as well as storage.” This scalable, consistent virtualisation will reduce the complexity of the virtualised environment, he added.

Discussing the interdependency between virtualisation, networking and storage, VMware country manager Chris Norton said: “Customers are increasingly stretching the capabilities of virtualisation beyond what it was traditionally designed to do. This technology evolution has created the interdependency.

“As a virtualisation vendor we have become increasingly reliant on the networking technology, because we now understand that we cannot move a virtual machine if we cannot move the network state with it. This dependency extends to shared storage as well, as it adds value to the customer's agility, flexibility and consolidation,” continued Norton.

Addressing a 20-year legacy of silo-based computing, Derek Peyton, business development manager for Cisco, argued that the transition towards collaborative solutions will bring to market computing services which will break down these silos.

“This partnership will bring to market 'a build once' outlook that will offer customers true virtualisation within the framework,” concluded Peyton.

Related stories:

• Cisco pushes convergence
• VMware, Intel in cahoots
• Storage goes virtual

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