Cisco getting into bed with Microsoft in IP initiative:
dailynews.yahoo.com
Friday September 10 10:56 PM EDT
Cisco kicking off major voice/data, QOS initiatives
John Rendleman and Paula Musich, ZDNet
Cisco Systems Inc. next week will embark on an ambitious effort to improve the performance and openness of its networking products.
The networking giant will unveil two major initiatives at NetWorld+Interop in Atlanta: one to more broadly integrate voice, data and video in a range of its equipment and a second to provide policy-based networking capabilities it co-developed with Microsoft Corp.
Cisco's voice/data/video announcement comprises an overarching hardware and software architecture for end-to-end integration of multiservice traffic, sources said. The architecture will encompass new convergence products and modifications of existing Cisco products, with a particular focus on its VOIP (voice-over-IP) devices, to let them operate within the new architecture, they said.
"It's much more around the convergence of voice and video," said one source who was briefed on the new architecture.
Becoming more VOIP-friendly
Cisco's revitalized VOIP effort is intended to deliver "open, strategic support for VOIP" across a wide range of Cisco's existing IP telephony products as well as its routers and LAN switches, one source said.
Current VOIP phones, including Cisco's, are based on proprietary hardware and software. Cisco will migrate its IP telephony systems to unspecified open, interoperable LAN standards, as it has attempted in carrier products with its Open Packet Telephony strategy.
As one component of the initiative, Cisco will modify its 5500- and 6500-series LAN switches to make them more VOIP-friendly, said a source who is evaluating Cisco's VOIP gear for use on his company's corporate campuses.
One of the first product sets Cisco is targeting to migrate to open platforms is the Cisco IP Telephones family, the IP and Ethernet phone systems the company acquired with its $145 million purchase of Selsius Systems Inc. last year.
End-to-End QOS
Cisco's new policy-based networking capabilities, dubbed Qualitative QOS (quality of service), are based on extensions to the Internet Engineering Task Force's emerging DiffServ standard and were jointly developed by Cisco and Microsoft. The standard establishes a broad range of prioritization for different traffic types across a WAN.
The joint work, called End-to-End QOS by IETF participants, is a marriage of DiffServ and the RSVP (Resource Reservation Protocol). The proposal calls for using RSVP at the edge of the network where application hosts reside, and DiffServ in core network switches and routers.
In a New York-based demonstration that will be Webcast at N+I, the two companies will show a Windows 2000 end station connected to Cisco switches, with an SAP AG R/3 application making a request to reserve bandwidth in the network for connecting to the SAP application.
The Cisco switch will apply a policy to the traffic to establish which level of service it is to receive. The Cisco QOS Policy Manager will define the policy, and the Cisco switches will carry it out.
The two vendors proposed the extensions to the IETF earlier this year, and the standards body is now evaluating a draft of the specification, called Internet DiffServ Extensions.
"This is the first opportunity to push policy all the way out to the end station so that it's speaking the same language [as the switches and routers]," said one source. "It can now qualify specific layers or transaction types in the application, so you can say, 'No Doom, hold the print job, but run payroll.'"
DiffServ, which is expected to be finalized early next year, "lets you mark packets and set up a minimum predefined behavior for all the [network] devices along the forwarding path for better end-to-end delivery of QOS," said Esmeralda Silva, an analyst at International Data Corp., in Framingham, Mass.
To date, Cisco and other vendors have created proprietary mechanisms to create and enforce application policies across an IP network. The growing number of vendors scrambling to build market awareness for their individual approaches is creating confusion among end users.
The IETF has found it excruciatingly difficult to improve IP's service-quality abilities and its interoperability with conventional voice and data technologies. The common goal of all such efforts is to enable administrators to maintain a consistent flow of application traffic within an IP network and define service levels on an application-specific basis.
Officials from Cisco, in San Jose, Calif., and Microsoft, of Redmond, Wash., declined to comment on their companies' N+I announcements.
Hope MSFT doesn't screw CSCO, and their software doesn't crash like windows,
Michael |
