Cisco Pushes Groundwork for Greener Networks

For Cisco, it’s all about power.

The networking vendor may be upping the power of its offerings in one regard — showing off new Nexus switching equipment with enhanced capabilities — but it’s simultaneously working to cut down on its products’ power in another way: their energy consumption.

Starting today, the company said its Catalyst offerings would begin supporting a new effort dubbed EnergyWise, which aims to more effectively manage energy consumption.

The new efforts from Cisco together aim to capitalize on enterprises’ efforts to save money by consolidating their networking assets — doing more with less. That’s become an important mantra for IT shops struggling to cope with the economic downturn and slashed budgets. For Cisco, the thinking is that it can cash in by positioning the network as the hub for regulating a large portion of enterprises’ energy use.

“This is really about the notion that the network is the platform,” William Choe, Director of Ethernet Switching told InternetNews.com. “Given the pervasiveness of networks and given that anything that connects to the network has a centralized platform, the network provides the multiplier effect on how you can deliver energy savings.”

The idea behind Cisco’s new EnergyWise program is that IT can manage the power utilization of networked devices by using an open software API residing on its Catalyst switches. Third-party device vendors have to support the API, but Cisco is wagering that EnergyWise’s benefits to customers make it advantageous to join in.

Cisco is planning on rolling out the EnergyWise program in stages, with the first stage available in February for Power over Ethernet (PoE) devices, which already are controlled by Ethernet connectivity, with power and data traveling over the same cable.

Starting in the summer of 2009, Cisco will begin expanding the program to non-PoE devices. Choe explained that the plan is to have a software agent that would interact with Cisco EnergyWise for power management on personal computers and peripherals.

By 2010, Cisco said it expects to expand the effort even further, adding support for building infrastructure control elements like lights, elevators and heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems.

The EnergyWise effort according to the current roadmap is focused on Cisco’s Catalyst switching lineup for deployment. While it’s not currently supported by Cisco’s Nexus, which is Cisco’s next-generation switching technology for datacenters, Choe said this may change.

“We are currently evaluating an insertion point for the Nexus,” he said. “We don’t have specific timelines for the Nexus family. We have heard customers’ requests that there is value in providing this capability in the datacenter, so we’re looking into it.”

Nexus lineup updates

Cisco’s also adding new cost-cutting, consolidation-friendly enhancements to its Nexus switches, introducing three new additions to the lineup: the Nexus 7018, Nexus 5010 and Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extender.

[cob:Special_Report]The Nexus platform first debuted a year ago with the Nexus 7000, joined in September by the Nexus 5000 which includes virtualization capabilities.

The new Nexus 7018 marks the new high-end offering for the Nexus line, with support for up to 512 10Gigabit Ethernet ports. On the other end of the spectrum is the new Nexus 5010, which is a 28-port switch. While the capacities of the two switches are different, the goals are the same — creating a unified fabric for datacenters on which all traffic flows.

“The primary use case is where customers want to consolidate the number of disparate fabrics in their network, and to reduce the number of layers in their network in order to reduce footprint,” Ram Velaga, vice president of product marketing for Cisco Data Center Solutions, explained to InternetNews.com.

Page 2: Consolidation via virtualization and direct memory access

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One of the key new mechanisms in the Nexus updates to help datacenter consolidation is a new take on network virtualization, called Virtual Device Context (VDC).

“Virtual Device Context allows a physical switch to logically be carved into four logical switches with complete isolation and security,” Velaga said.

The benefits include a greater level of granular control for large networks, Cisco said.

VDC is the opposite approach of what Cisco rolled out in 2007 on its Cisco Catalyst 6550 switch, with its Virtual Switching System (VSS). VSS enables two physically separate Catalyst switches to be combined into one virtual switch.

Cisco and other networking vendors for years have enabled what’s known as “virtual LAN,” or VLAN , as a way to break up one physical network into multiple virtual networks.

Velaga said VDC solves an access control issue that could come up with VLANs: If you run a switch with VLANs, all line cards on the same physical switch see the same VLANs.

“So say a customer has 256 MAC addresses. All line cards would see the same addresses since they are all forwarding as if it was a single switch,” he said, adding that the setup still enables admins to isolate traffic across the network.

But with VDC, “you can carve out the switch into four separate logical switches and each one sees a different set of addresses,” he said. As a result, with VDC, one logical switch could be restarted or shut down without impacting traffic on the other logical switches.

Direct memory access via Ethernet

Cisco is also using the Nexus update as an opportunity to further consolidate the capabilities of Ethernet as the primary fabric for datacenters. In particular, the new Cisco RAB technology — short for RDMA Accelerated Buffer — brings Infiniband’s low levels of latency to Ethernet.

“We’re taking advantage of the lossless Ethernet capabilities in our Nexus portfolio and combining with our software, so Ethernet host adapters can run direct memory access,” Velaga said. “So now you can get the same low latency of Infiniband on Ethernet infrastructure.”

While Cisco is preaching the merits of consolidation to its customers and the market, Velaga added that Cisco itself is benefiting directly from its technology.

Velaga claimed that Cisco’s WebEx infrastructure has now been consolidated with unified fabric and VDI to consume fewer resources. In fact, Velaga claimed that as a result of the consolidation Cisco has been able to deploy up to 30 percent more servers in its WebEx data centers.

“In these economic times when customers can’t come up with outlays for new datacenters instead they can re-use their existing facilities by freeing up network resources that were otherwise consumed with network devices,” Velaga said.