SIMPLIFYING THE DATA CENTER. Networking company Cisco Systems outlines how it plans to simplify the data center at their regional headquarters here. INQUIRER.net executive editor Leo Magno talks to Rajiv Ramaswami, the company's vice president and general manager for the data center business unit, about Cisco's Data Center 3.0 vision and its unified fabric architecture. Video taken by Joel Pinaroc in Singapore.
MANILA, Philippines -- The continuing digital information explosion and new business pressures are forcing companies to rethink their data center strategies, according to networking firm Cisco Systems.
At a briefing in the company’s regional headquarters in Singapore, Cisco officials said information stored in disk arrays is growing at 70 percent, composed of more types of data like transactions, documents, forms, web pages, images, video, voice and messages. At the same time, more information-related regulations in different countries are forcing businesses to store more data. These regulations include SEC 17a-4, NASD 3010, Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II, UK Metadata and the eSign Act, among others.
“Data centers are under increasing pressure from new business challenges and operational limitations,” said Bernie Trudel, head of data center technology at Cisco Asia Pacific. “Information retention is extending three to 10 years, and new applications can take 60-180 days to deploy.”
Trudel added that “50 percent of enterprise-class data centers will be technologically obsolete within 24 months,” quoting a study conducted by the Gartner Group.
Data centers are facilities that house dozens to hundreds of servers that provide computing resources for big organizations. They are a set of computers, storage, networking and communications equipment that are combined to create massive computing power.
“The data center is moving from a centralized structure, to decentralized to virtualized,” said Trudel, citing the move from the mainframe to modern-day data centers. “We are now at Data Center 3.0 which is service-oriented and based on Web 2.0. So the network is now becoming the platform.”
Trudel said that the combination of information growth and new business requirements is forcing companies to build data centers around the goal of increasing service agility and availability to increase customer satisfaction, while speeding up returns on investments and lowering total cost of ownership.
“Data Center 3.0 embodies Cisco’s goal of making data centers energy-efficient, automated, consolidated and virtualized so that customers can respond to changing business needs,” said Trudel. “We are at a new inflection point going toward a service-oriented architecture. So Cisco’s data center model is service-centric.”
The foundation for Cisco’s Data Center 3.0 transformation includes the new Nexus family of data center-class switches as well as the expansion of the Cisco Catalyst line.
“Cisco is transforming the data center into a virtualized environment to quickly respond to business needs with its new Data Center 3.0 vision,” said Trudel.
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