I had been busy with the demo on Cisco UCS with VMware and EMC recently. 1 of the key features I had tested was about the Stateless Computing claim by Cisco. As a server or system guys, we all know that the ability to maintain the system state with UUID, Firmware, BIOS, LAN & SAN are important during a hardware changes. Honest speaking, the demo performed last week was my 1st experience on the stateless computing. The outcome was impressive.
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Unified had become a key word today, and what does it really meant for everyone? It is similar as the phenomenal Cloud Computing 2 years ago. We had seen the storage vendor are moving from FC SAN, ISCSI SAN, NAS to a unified storage today. What a unified storage does today are providing all the storage protocol standard in the market in a single box. Vendor such as EMC and Netapp had their Unified storage to support this today and proven to be performing and user are happy with it.
Beside unified storage, we are looking forward for unified computing system for the server compute platform too. Cisco had moved ahead of their competitor to bring this to the world and it is 1 fo the great platform that get attraction and adoption worldwide. Cisco UCS or Nexus 5000 both provide the unified I/O capabilities and allow us to transform the data center architecture today. Beside consolidating LAN and SAN into 1 with FCoE, the more interesting capabilities that get attention by us are the switching capacity.
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In respond to the VCE alliance which had been gaining famous in town, NetApp had officially launched the VCN alliance yesterday to provide the 1st secure multi-tenancy solution worldwide to the potential customer. This alliance partnership are slightly different from VCE as there will not be a join venture company to sell this solution in 1 part number. They are targeting to sell this solution through the certified partner worldwide.
You can have a full view about the VCN alliance details from here.
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Memory and I/O always the most important pieces in virtualization environment which will define the consolidation ratio in server virtualization. This will direct impact the TCO and ROI for the data center project. Cisco had launched their UCS server for quite some times which able to scale up the server memory up to 384 GB per 2 CPU server. Cisco UCS support up to 48 DIMMs slot in a single blade or rack mount server follow with the 250 M1 series product range.
This picture show how the memory architecture been define in the Cisco memory architecture.
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Just came across the release note from Cisco and VMware about the latest version Nexus 1000V R1.2 for VMware vSphere 4. According to the original blog there are new improvement on the area below
- GUI setup following software install
- Layer 3 control between VSM and VEMs
- Virtual Service Domains for classifying and separating traffic for network services
- iSCSI Multipath—supporting multipath feature introduced in vSphere 4
- XML API for developing client apps for managing/monitoring the Nexus 1000V
- DHCP Snooping for validating DHCP messages and filtering invalid responses
- Dynamic ARP Inspection for validating ARP requests and responses
- IP Source Guard for filtering traffic on interfaces to valid MAC and IP addresses
- MAC Pinning for assigning Ethernet port members to particular port channel subgroup (where upstream switches do not support port channels)
- Static Pinning
There are more new features in the latest release and please read more from here.
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