Cisco next week is expected to unveil new and enhanced data centre products that are designed to more easily interconnect and allocate resources among multiple data centres and are optimized for cloud computing and virtualization.
The Cisco enhancements extend across the company’s Nexus 7000 and Catalyst 6500 and 4900M Ethernet switches as well as its Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) acceleration and Application Control Engine (ACE) load balancing appliances.
Front and centre is an enhancement to the Nexus 7000’s NX-OS operating system called Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV). This is a data centre interconnect feature intended to simplify establishment of those links by extending Layer 2 Ethernet LANs across geographically dispersed data centres.
Essentially, OTV performs “MAC routing,” Cisco says. OTV encapsulates and tunnels Ethernet through a routed Layer 3 infrastructure to enable multiple dispersed data centers to look like one logical entity. This allows IT administrators to move workloads and virtual machines across data centres without having to redesign or reconfigure their network, Cisco says.
This is important as more enterprises deploy, for example, VMware’s VMotion to move data centre workloads across long distances for resource allocation or disaster recovery. It requires only four commands per site and can be enabled as a simple overlay over existing Layer 3 networks in just five minutes, Cisco claims.
Other data centre interconnect techniques – such as MPLS or dark fiber – require months of design and planning, the company says. But what if a customer already uses MPLS with a Layer 2 tunneling technique such as pseudowires?
OTV may not be needed in those cases, but it still could be used for fault isolation, and for faster, easier establishment of new data centre interconnections, Cisco claims. It also alleviates the need to manage a Web of individual point-to-point links, the company says.”The routers do all of the work,” says Craig Huitema, Cisco director of marketing for data centre solutions.
OTV also includes resiliency features such as multi-pathing, multi-homing and loop prevention, and it suppresses flooding of unknown Layer 2 traffic and spanning tree packets, Cisco says. This helps ensure that failures such as broadcast storms or spanning-tree loops in one data centre are contained and do not propagate to other data centres, the company says.
OTV will be available on the Nexus 7000 in April. Cisco plans to also extend it to other platforms in the future.