Cisco's Jayshree Ullal touts unified virtualization

By Mark Schlack, Vice President, Editorial 05 Jun 2006 | SearchStorage.com

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Ullal: For a new environment, it's a lot easier to write the prescription and figure out what it costs. For an existing environment, I think you really have to look at your pain points -- where are you going to get the most bang for your buck? That kind of pain point [analysis] has to be driven [from the] CIO down.

Probably just as important [as identifying pain points] is that a lot of people will come and tell us 'Oh in 2008, we're building a new data center and I need help.' Then we can work with our partners to define what the data center of 2008 will look like.

One could read what your saying as, if you're not starting with a new data center, this is all pretty difficult.

Ullal: You have to be much more prescriptive. You cannot do security, virtualization, application delivery, management, consolidation -- all these cool things -- at once. You will try one or two of these things, and then it may lead to more and more.

People are recognizing that the data center is one of their greatest assets, and they will do any one of these things or more.

One of the things we hear from IT managers is that they usually find that any one of these new technologies we're discussing are OK -- it will deliver some of what it advertises -- but there's no possibility of working them together in a unified way. If you just take servers, storage and networks, and look at the virtualization aspect, each of those virtual domains is completely separate.

Ullal: Completely, yes. We definitely feel a responsibility in this space because we really feel that it's a multivendor scenario that gets us there. Even if Cisco builds the greatest data center management tool, that [users] will just call Cisco and trash everything they're doing, because so much of this is 'what do I do with servers, storage, applications,' etc.

Even in our own IT organization, we have been very challenged in our data centers. We end up writing a lot of scripts and home-brewed management tools to overcome the problem.

But one of the things you'll probably see Cisco do, which is quite different than from the way we did things in the past is … VFrame, which today is our application for managing InfiniBand provisioning. It's something we'll be really focused on and we'll be making more and more data center capable. If we could take an end-to-end service provisioning tool like VFrame and not just have it to do InfiniBand, but have it manage switches or Fibre Channel devices, or load balancing or a firewall, then all of a sudden you're provisioning a service … and that's the goal. That's still a very network-centric goal and we have to make sure that we have the right APIs to work with storage vendors, etc. It doesn't address the multivendor [challenge], but even within the network, there's too many points, too. I think the real opportunity is to activate a service rather than activate individual boxes.

I think the No. 1 issue is a single orchestration service that will allow you to deal with the new aspect of virtualization. It can be a mile wide and an inch deep … God knows I have enough CLI and SNMP and management and performance tools that are deep.

The scenario I hear about most is that an IT director has become aware that business users are saying that R3, say, is slow today. How can they trace the problem across the application, the server, the database, the data network, the storage network and the storage array? Very few people are able to do that.

Ullal: That's exactly what I'm talking about. That's exactly what I mean by orchestrating and creating a whole map of the environment. Then the individual performance management tools for each [domain] can be used.

Still, people tell me that they really don't care much about managing provisioning in the absence of managing performance. Once they've installed their environment, how can they tell if they really need more capacity unless they can understand the performance levels?

Ullal: What's really needed … is that I want to be able to say 'I have a policy that I want to enable the following elements of the data center to be activated to provide the right load balancing, networking, storage, etc.' That's our policy statement. From that point on, a magical tool, let's say like VFrame, should be able to pick up and translate that policy into a stream of actions. Not me configuring every box but pushing that policy right through. And then give me an overall look at data center topology, what is the level of performance, what is the level of network utilization. And I can do that today with VFrame, provided I have an InfiniBand network. The idea would be to extend that capability to the whole data center network.

When do you foresee that kind of data center happening?

Ullal: The concept is already very much there now. The products will be there. The habits and the design methodology in our customers will take one to two years. And I think over the next three to five years you will start to see more widespread deployment of these on-demand data centers, active provisioning of data centers, end to end data centers. There's always the hot product, but the real problem to solve is how to have end-to-end availability, end-to-end virtualization. Even if you don't have every end solved, [you will gain] an overall big picture, then you can go do the [tactical] programs. We view this as central to our data center. And we also view this as central to the way we work with partners. Clearly, whatever we're going to do is going to be very Cisco network-centric, and then the question is how do we map it to the right APIs.

We're thinking there should be well-defined XML, or WSDM [web services distributed management] or WSDL [web services descriptive language] kind of interfaces that work with IBM's Tivoli, or HP [Hewlett-Packard Co.] OpenView or EMC [Corp.]'s orchestrator -- those kind of things … A lot of these exist already, that's the good news.

There has to be an element of 'how do we solve our problems' and 'how do we solve the multivendor problem.' The industry hasn't even solved the problems of one vendor. I can't get a Cisco provisioning network across all my data centers today, so we're going to talk about that first.

Today, those two goals seem in conflict. The companies that spend a lot of money integrating their own products then want to go sell that as the end all and be all. They don't want to play nice with others.

Ullal:Yeah, and that's got to change. There's got to be an element of what you do, you do well. But there's also got to be a responsibility element of what you do is not in isolation and needs to work well with others.

What mechanism is there in the industry today to make that happen?

Ullal: There are many more well-defined interfaces today that you can have in your products to make them work well and interoperate. Whereas in the past, they were closed systems, they weren't open. You can build a loosely coupled infrastructure that can work across these interfaces and software systems much more easily today. The difficulty is you can't have them be backwards compatible with legacy systems.

Let's change gears for a minute and talk about people. There's been a very strong trend toward specialization in IT. In recent years, in larger companies, labor is divided and people are very specialized in one tool or one skill. What's your advice to experienced IT people as you look at this architecture that unifies things, do you more or less specialization in IT.

Ullal: I think specialization is unavoidable … but I would add another vector to that. You should have the individual technical experts but you have a valid business making model, both from a budget and a CIO perspective that allows you to take strategic initiatives that span these technical pools of knowledge.

I don't see the vertical specialization going away. In fact, I see that getting greater with the level of technological complexity, that's the only way to deal with. But you should be able to say, given that we have all of these experts, how do I build a horizontal office of the CIO that can look at architectures and designs across all of these boundaries.

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