Cisco Aims to Simplify Datacenter Migrations

Getting datacenters to talk to each other can be tough. Cisco feels your pain. The networking giant has developed a new technology that facilitates datacenter migration irrespective of the underlying transport mechanism.

Enterprise Networking Planet takes a look at the new system, and hears from Cisco about what it can do for network admins.

Datacenters today are interconnected via any number of different public and private connection mechanisms. Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) is now adding another choice to the mix with its new Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV) technology that enables virtual datacenter migrations using the company’s Nexus 7000 switching gear.

With OTV, Cisco is aiming to make it easier to connect datacenters with a technology that will enable data to flow from one to another regardless of the underlying transport mechanism.

“From a technology point of view, what OTV does is it encapsulates the Ethernet frames or LAN traffic inside an IP packet and then that can be sent across any existing mechanism a datacenter has,” Craig Griffin, Cisco’s director of product management, told InternetNews.com.

Griffin added that OTV traffic can traverse fiber, MPLS or even conventionally routed IP networks, making datacenter connections a matter of simply issuing some OTV commands.

Read the full story at Enterprise Networking Planet:


Cisco Introduces Overlay Transport Virtualization