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Looking to take its data center vision one step further, Cisco is developing a new data center
architecture called the Cisco Data Center Business Advantage. The architecture
will feature three pillars of technology, including Cisco Unified Computing,
Cisco Unified Fabric and a new portfolio called Cisco Unified Network Services.
The three technology areas will form the foundation of Data Center Business
Advantage, the company said.

The change is an evolution of the Cisco data center framework, according to
Shashi Kiran, solutions marketing manager for data center/virtualization at
Cisco Systems. Cisco Data
Center Business Advantage is
intended to improve the agility and efficiency of traditional and virtualized
data center environments.

“The idea here is that all of the data center has been changing to more of a
strategic asset,” Kiran said. There’s an increasing need for tying data center
investments into business relevance, and this updated Cisco data center
framework is intended to help IT innovations deliver on business value, he
said.

The new overall element being introduced is Cisco Unified Network Services,
which is meant to provide rich services in physical and virtual form factors while
also offering flexibility in building consistent, policy-based provisioning,
operational simplicity and workload portability across the network, compute and
cloud environments.

“What it is, is a simple distillation of a vision we have to deliver any
service in any form factor on any platform,” Kiran said. This includes
application networking, policies and security all available for physical,
virtual and cloud infrastructures. The goal is to provide consistent policies
across all the environments.

Under Cisco Unified Network Services, the networking vendor is introducing
new products, including the Cisco Virtual Security Gateway (VSG) and Cisco
virtual Wide Area Application Services (vWAAS).