INTERCONNECTS

The Globus Consortium, a non-profit Grid computing organization dedicated to the commercial advancement of the Globus Toolkit -- today announced the addition of Cisco Systems to its growing roster of contributing members. Cisco will collaborate with other Globus Consortium members -- including HP, IBM, Intel, Sun Microsystems, Nortel Networks and Univa -- to steer the enterprise-level development efforts of the Globus Toolkit, the recognized standard in open source Grid middleware. The Globus Toolkit is the de facto standard for open source Grid infrastructure, enabling IT managers to view all of their distributed computing resources around the world as a unified virtual datacenter. To learn more about Cisco's views on open source Grid computing, view the latest issue of the Globus Consortium Journal Web site. "Grid is a new frontier in the convergence of enterprise network, compute and storage resources," said Rob Redford, VP of Product and Technology Marketing at Cisco Systems. "While the open source Globus Toolkit is still an early stage enterprise technology, Cisco sees it as an important rallying point for vendors to collaboratively push the boundaries of distributed computing and coordinated resource sharing." Cisco's intelligent Data Center Networking Architecture represents the company's growing portfolio of products and services for the "utility" data center -- including CPU and I/O resource sharing and new virtualization capabilities for enterprise networks. Included in this portfolio are InfiniBand-based Cisco Server Fabric Switch (SFS) and new VFrame 3.0 data center virtualization software, which deliver benefits such as resource utilization, faster provisioning, and reduced downtime. "Grid will continue to push more intelligence into the network," said Ian Foster, Board Member with the Globus Consortium. "There will also be a blurring of the boundaries between the network, the operating systems and the middleware. Therefore it's critical to have the full participation of the networking industry in the commercial-level development of the Globus Toolkit -- so we're very excited that Cisco joined the Globus Consortium."