own standards-based management tools, it will be easier for such vendors to manage Cisco nets without having to overhaul their software, Hamilton says.

But the push is not without its challenges. Cisco will have to maintain its gear to keep current customers happy. Perhaps more difficult, Cisco may have to sell to systems administrators, as application performance in many IT shops is directly linked to specific servers.

"Cisco is a huge networking equipment vendor, and trying to change that mindset in the market will be tough to do," Hamilton says. "Cisco wants to position the network as the platform for data center automation going forward."

In fact, Cisco believes the network is the where companies should be rolling out virtualization.

According to Clive Foreman, a vice president in Cisco’s Network Management Technology Group, the company will in 2006 announce network virtualization tools, currently under development with the help of technology acquired through its purchase of Topspin, a maker of grid computing technology.

As Foreman explains, when other products are used to provision or reposition servers to accommodate load on demand, there is also usually a network component that need to be reconfigured to support the system change. As companies such as IBM and HP, virtualize the storage and server layers, Cisco will step up to virtualize the network layer and enable more automation when such changes occur.

"Today customers probably have a great server tool, but someone still had to go and manually update the network settings," Foreman says.

Yankee Group’s Hamilton explains that server and storage virtualization is done on more component-by-component basis, but network virtualization can touch all infrastructure components and represent the resources among separate technology pools, for example, server, storage and application.

"The network is the consistent component across the entire infrastructure, and it can make more sense to virtualize that than support virtualization across isolated pools of technology," Hamilton says.

By Denise Dubie - Network World (US online)