The Next Generation Data Center - Cisco Data Center 3.0

Data Center Focus
Like most of you, I've never heard of Data Center 1.0 or 2.0 either, but according to Jayshree Ullal, Cisco senior vice president of the Datacenter, Switching and Security Technology Group : "Cisco’s Data Center 1.0 and 2.0 strategies focused on data center consolidation, 3.0 targets virtualization and automation".

Data Center 3.0 = Server + Storage + Network Virtualization
Data Center 3.0 built to support modern and anticipate future applications such as social networking, crowd mass collaboration, etc., based on consolidation and virtualization trend for the sake of green computing...

Aimed at optimizing application performance, service levels, efficiency and collaboration, Data Center 3.0 fabric's provides real-time, dynamic orchestration of infrastructure services from shared pools of virtualized server, storage and network resources.

Data Center 3.0 Components

1. VFrame Data Center Orchestration Platform - Runs on Linux Red Hat server, Vframe provisions resources together as virtual services. VFrame provisions the compute, networking and storage resources via open Web API.
2. WAAS (Wide Area Application Services) - Application Delivery to increase application performance on slow WAN links.
3. ACE XML Gateway - It brings application intelligence into the network and enables efficient deployment of secure, reliable, and accelerated Web service environments based on XML (Extensible Markup Language) and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) using a shared, network infrastructure.
   
4. SAN switches - provides Fiber Channel, Ethernet, FICON, etc. , available Cisco MDS SAN switches family
5. Data Mobility Manager - is a software feature for the MDS 9000 SSM (Storage Services Module) that enables movement of blocks of data from a source device to a destination device. Such movement is typically needed to address array lease expiration events, capacity planning and implementation of tiered storage strategies.
6. Storage Media Encryption (SME), available on the Cisco MDS 9000 family switches and Cisco Fabric Manager, encrypts data at rest on heterogeneous tape devices and virtual tape libraries. This software enable highly available encryption services to be deployed and managed without rewiring or reconfiguring storage area networks (SANs), or installing additional software.
7. Nexus 7000 series - this is the nexus (center) of the Data Center 3.0 with switch fabric capacity up to 15 Tbps. Currently it supports high density GE and 10 GE interfaces with roadmap to 40 G and 100 Gigabit Ethernet. Nexus 7000 operating systems's is NX-OS that combines SAN-OS (MDS's operating system) and Multilayer Switching capability. One of Nexus 7000's unique feature is Virtual Device Context (each virtual device runs with its own process)