Network giant Cisco recently announced its plans for next-generation datacentres at the “Networkers at Cisco Live 2007” event in the US, in an attempt to push its IT management credentials.

Cisco’s UK and Ireland datacentre consulting systems architect, Ian Bond, said that its Data Centre 3.0 vision is a roadmap for the new hardware, software and services that Cisco hopes will increase its penetration into the rapidly growing datacentre management sector.

Bond said that the plans incorporate what he called phase III of Cisco’s strategy, the final part of Cisco’s approach to datacentre architectures. “Phase I was concerned with consolidation, higher port densities and embedding more ‘intelligence’ in the network to allow firms to move from multiple datacentres to a smaller number,” he explained.

Phase II was virtualisation. “We put virtual SANs (VSANs) into the Cisco storage networking products, like the MDS9000 switch family, from day one so you could cut out chunks of the physical infrastructure and create a dedicated VSAN for specific departments,” Bond said.

Phase III of the roadmap is recognition that having to manage virtual infrastructures will not be trivial, according to Bond. “Cisco will need to give IT managers the ability to manage and operate virtualised environments more easily, and the ability to integrate with server, storage, and other management software products from vendors such as CA, HP, IBM and BMC,” he said.

Bond added that phase III would develop over the next 12 to 24 months. “You’ll see more products coming out that enable IT managers to be able to automate and work with these large datacentres that rely heavily on virtualised services,” he explained.

To kick-start its push into large datacentres, Cisco has announced new hardware, software and services, as well as a restructuring of its channel partnerships.

The main new product Cisco announced was VFrame Data Center (VFrame DC), a management tool that will use the “intelligence” embedded in its Cisco network infrastructure to provision computing, network and storage resources. From such provisioning, datacentre managers will be able to create application-specific virtualised services, an approach Cisco hopes will reduce deployment times and offer better resource utilisation.

To achieve integration with so-called “super-manager” systems, such as CA Unicenter, HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli and BMC, VFrame DC will need code to be written using VFrame DC’s web services application programming interface (API), explained Bond.

IDC’s datacentre networks director, Lucinda Borovick, said: “This approach has the potential to deliver more efficient application provisioning, reduce costs and increase IT productivity.”

However, analyst firm Quocirca’s service director, Bob Tarzey, said that the going could be tough in this market, even for Cisco.

“Sorting out network-centric problems is no big deal for Cisco. But when it comes to datacentre management, there are a lot of specialists in this area already,” Tarzey said. “If I were looking at how best to improve the way my datacentre was managed, I’d be more likely to turn to [recent HP acquisition] Opsware rather than Cisco, even if I was a Cisco customer.”

Tarzey added that a lot of IT managers want to have best-of-breed management tools for each area. “You could argue that something that tries to be all things to all people is never going to do the job well enough,” he said.

New hardware launched simultaneously on the back of the Data Centre 3.0 announcement included a 18-port 4Gbit/s module for Cisco’s multicast distributed switching (MDS) 9500/9200 series switches; a new multiservice modular switch, the MDS 9222i; and a new multilayer fabric switch, the 10Gbit/s-capable MDS 9134.

Other software to go with the launch included a WAN Optimisation package that is designed to integrate with NetQoS’s application monitoring software and a Web 2.0 services acceleration package. Two other software packages for migrating and encrypting data were also released, called Data Mobility Manager and Storage Media Encryption.

The final piece of Cisco’s announcement is Smart Call Home, a service feature available through Cisco SMARTnet, its technical support service giving customers “direct, anytime access” to Cisco engineers and technical resources. Initially available on Cisco’s flagship Catalyst 6500 series switches, the service monitors network device health, automatically notifying customers of problems and generating a Cisco service request ticket routed to the right team for the particular problem.