Posted by: Eric Siegel
Yes! Cisco is indeed becoming a computer company, as I originally blogged a year ago in "Cisco the Computer Company." (Go look at it!) A little while ago (sorry, late blog entry), I went to the annual Cisco analyst's conference, and it was full of further progress towards making the network into the backplane for a distributed multi-server computer system -- in effect, they're re-creating the Tandem Computers (HP) Integrity NonStop backplane in a heterogeneous server environment.
Just look at what they're doing or planning to do:
- Lossless, extremely-low-latency transport ("lossless Ethernet" and cut-through switching, similar to NonStop's ServerNet low-latency inter-processor buses with "wormhole" switching)
- Positive identification of network users and of individual transactions, along with accurate timestamps. (Great for system audit and diagnosis in a message-based distributed server system)
- Standard API for talking to the network, asking for specific services and learning the identities, locations, and more about other network users.
With a secure, reliable "backplane" of the Cisco network, other manufacturers' servers and appliances could create a mesh of message-based services. And Cisco would provide the common, platform-independent transport API, integrating them all into one high-performance, secure fabric and, at the same time, handling data compression, transport performance optimization, and the measurement and diagnostic taps and tools needed to trace the performance of individual transactions or other interactions through the production system.
The big question, of course, is how this integrates with OS efforts from the computer system vendors, such as VMware and Microsoft, and with transaction monitors. Where is the line between the reliable, secure, "deliver the message exactly once" transport, and the higher-level OS functions? I'm very interested to see how this evolves!
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