Cisco's Flagship Catalyst 6500 switches to benefit from new services module

Cisco has improved the way it supports application rollouts by announcing a new services module for its flagship Catalyst 6500 series switches.

Called the Application Control Engine (ACE), the new module along with a new software upgrade to the Application Velocity System (AVS) will allow firms to deploy, provision and manage complex applications more quickly, said Cisco.

New virtual partitioning capabilities in ACE will allow better co-ordination between staff rolling out apps, said Cisco's technical marketing manager for its application delivery business unit, Stefano Testa.

"[Without such tools staff might] struggle with infrastructure and they could require new hardware, which may mean recabling, physically moving already integrated hardware around and changing IP addresses," said Testa. "The virtual partitioning should allow different teams to manage these specific parts and would also ease maintenance – which might take up just one day where before it might take three to four days."

The ACE module plugs directly into the switch fabric, and converges functions that used to be on other modules, such as a content switching module and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)-offload. This reduces the room taken up by switches and provides "a considerable performance increase", said Testa.

ACE configurations available now support 4Gbit/s, 8Gbit/s or 16Gbit/s throughput and cost about £23,000 + VAT, £34,000 + VAT and £57,000 + VAT respectively.
The AVS application security software module will be released in early May priced at £5,700 + VAT.

Testa argued that organisations would be attracted to the new tools to improve efficiency in their datacentres when they have a requirement to deploy applications quickly, perhaps overnight.

Testa said that consolidation, application migration and the rapid growth of web-based applications are among the common causes of problems in datacentres.