Cisco had recently added new Fabric Interconnect to their product line up which provide more choice to their client to be consider for their deployment. Previously there were only 6120XP and 6140XP in place for the Fabric interconnect architecture as part of Cisco UCS. The new Fabric Interconnect 6248UP which provide 32 ports FCoE with additional 16 ports expansion module on unified port available which support FCoE, LAN and SAN FC with appropriate module.
While introduce new Fabric Interconnect, the IO Module for UCS Blade Chassis had been further enhance with 2208XP which provide 80Gbps throughput per IO module, and allowed up to 160Gbps per chassis. This option will allow users to provide higher throughput to the blade infrastructure which require more than 80Gbps per chassis.
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Arista could be fairly new in this region, but they had been proven to be 1 of the reliable and high performing low latency switches in the market today. The main market for them are mainly focus on trading, FSI and high performance environment. Lately, I had noticed Arista start to move into cloud & virtualization market aggressively. While Arista is very aggressive on this, there are some changes or option been brought into the market by them.
10Gbps Ethernet no longer as a dream to most enterprise environment. It had become affordable, and realistic to be adopted while users decided to build the virtualization or private enterprise cloud. I had always highlighted that network had become major component of the success for cloud or virtualization, therefore the manageability on the virtual switch had become equally important as well. Previously, Cisco Nexus 1000V is the only choice to perform virtual switch layer management. If you do not want to go for it, you have another choice here. Arista had a similar offer which is vEOS, that allow virtual traffic direct integrate and visible over to the Arista Physical Network switches.
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Everyone is closely follow up the news after the Japan Earth quake last week, not just because the impact to the country, environment and also the people who are suffering from the incident. As from IT perspective, I am strongly urging all of us to reconsider many of the activity which been carry out there 24×7 today, to re-look into the strategy which could improve and save the environment. The Heat, e-waste and green issues been created due to IT is HIGH and we could not deny it. Therefore the latest solution and technology are very emphasis to reduce the necessary foot print & energy consumption which could harm the environment.
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I had been busy with numbers of Data Center Projects recently. All of these projects are referring to Data Center Expansion or new Data Center Build up requirements. There are number of interest discussion we had with multiple clients and exchange technical knowledge and opinion from each others. Does a data center efficiencies or success measure by the size, usable capacity, density or etc? Everyone should had a different opinion about this topic.
Traditional Data center were built by M&E or facilities management, mostly without IT department involvement. This had been transformed in most enterprise organization as IT has the better understanding what will be deployed into the data center after it build. There are always conflict from Facility and IT, as both KPI been measure separately and conflict to each other. Let’s assume a 5000 SFts data center, the facility guy may require to fill up the max capacity with the lowest budget. It may physical fill up with few hundred of racks and look nice at the end, but the usability could be question due to the density and capacity per rack which impact the data center life cycle. A physical 42U rack doesn’t mean it allow us to fully mounted any physical devices into it, as we need to consider about the power and cooling pieces. From IT perspective, they will prefer to use less space into the data center, and reduce the power, cooling & cabling to achieve green IT environment. This had been part of IT main goal with storage consolidation, virtualization & I/O virtualization. If the power and cooling capacity are not proper plan, IT will not able to optimize the data center facilities.
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Unified Storage………Sounds new to you? or sounds familiar to you? No right or wrong answer here, but it had become the dream of every storage vendor to offer this to their client especially in mid range, enterprise and virtualization environment. I remembered Netapp was the 1st started this, follow by other competitors in the market.
What is unified storage?
A single platform support multi-protocol such as FC, ISCSI, NFS, CIFS, FCoE and etc. It also support file, volume and block level data access.
You will able to get the unified box from either Netapp, EMC and HDS in the market now.
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