Omar Sultan May 27, 2008

Barry:

The stratavia products look interesting—especially the predictive analytics.  I think this area (data center automation) is going to shortly become a center of activity in the data center since it helps address the complexity spawned by virtualization and increasing asset utilization and operational efficiency, which should then help with things like TCO, power and cooling, etc.

I’d expect to see increased innovation in this area as well as some M&A;activity as companies (Cisco included) race to deliver a holistic solution.

Omar

Jason Jun 23, 2008

Omar,

Other companies already do offer a holistic solution. Expand Networks has been doing WAN optimization for a decade now. Incidentally they are also considered a leader by Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. Cisco is considered merely a “challenger”. Of course its best to find out for yourself:

http://www.expand.com/Products/Free-Evaluation.aspx

Omar Sultan Jun 24, 2008

Jason:

I spent some time on the Expand website.  Perhaps I missed something, but their focus seems to be primarily WAN optimization.

By holistic, I meant management systems with a more encompassing scope, so you are no longer managing infrastructure directly.  Say you need to move a workload across racks or across data centers for BC, SLA or power/cooling reasons.  I am looking to a future where you can take a top-down approach—move the workload and have the underlying infrastructure be smart enough to figure out what to do in response.

irfaan harris Jun 28, 2008

Imagine V-Frame on Steroids

http://www.cirba.com/news/press_releases/2008/080617.htm

http://www.cirba.com/forms/form.cfm?f=23

Gary Maddock Oct 29, 2009

I agree that Expand seems to be WAN optimisation, is this relevant?