Server management specialist Opsware has announced a strategic partnership with network giant Cisco. Under the deal, Cisco will sell a version of Opsware's Network Automation System integrated with its own management automation suite.

Opsware president and chief executive Ben Horowitz said this is Opsware's most strategic partnership, and is a milestone for the firm.

Horowitz said the deal would foster much better integration between Opsware's management tools and Cisco's network automation suite, resulting in a number of benefits for IT managers.

"System administrators will get visibility into which servers are linked to which network devices. Currently when a switch goes down it's not easy to see which servers are impacted," Horowitz said. "Also, adding a new web server to a load balancer currently requires the load balancer to be updated," but after integration there will be a simpler way of handling such issues, Horowitz said.

A team of Cisco engineers will work to ensure Opsware Network Automation System has broad and deep support for Cisco products. "This is a partnership where we're working deeply with Cisco, and the deal will be particularly important for us as we sell into firms using Cisco kit," Horowitz added.

Horowitz said the partnership could help with one of the oldest problems affecting datacentres. "One of the most vexing issues in most companies is the duplex mismatching problem," he commented. This problem occurs when servers and switches attempt to negotiate the best link characteristics between them, such as choosing 100Mbit/s rather than 10Mbit/s if both devices support the higher speed.

Though link speed negotiation works well, many products fail to use full duplex connections when they could do so. Full duplex links can double the performance of an Ethernet link between devices, and are particularly important for getting the most performance from server systems.

"This problem can cost millions in lost productivity and lower than necessary utilisation," said Horowitz. He added that the forthcoming integrated tools will allow IT managers to quickly spot and remedy such difficulties.