I found some very good post over the internet, you can refer the URL below for more information about the new update provided in Firmware 1.4

Unified Computing Blog

M. Sean McGee

This new setup are included with 10 G Ethernet uplink from UCS 6120 to Catalyst 6509 through Fiber, and utilizing FC Uplinks from UCS 6120 to MDS 9124. In my test, I removed the VLAN that I created purposely for FCoE, and found that there are no impact to the configuration.  I had confirmed with the support guys that if you are doing an uplink with FC from UCS 6100 to MDS, you will not require to tag the specified VLAN that created for the VSAN in the configuration.

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.

The Nexus 5000 or UCS 6140 switches supported up to 1.14 Tbits/s and this number are more than enough to consolidate all the necessary traffic it need to be delivered by the LAN & SAN. If you have this solution in place today and well integrated with the unified storage as well as the core networking environment, you can easily choose to run NAS, ISCSI or FC through the same Unified frabics and Unified Storage you have. As everyone know, there are no perfect solution or protocol for every scenario, but now, you will able to choose the right protocol for every different computing system, application and database requirement without implementing separate ISCSI, NFS or FC physical infrastructure.

This is a nice picture to summarize the description about Unified Platform which I get it from http://viewyonder.com

Once I unpacked the UCS Chassis from the box, it took me less than 10 mins to slot in 5 units of the B200M1 with 48GB Memory , 2x Intel 5540 and 2 x 146 SAS Local HDD each. At the same time, I did try to open up the casing for 1 of the blade,. it took me less than 1 min to do so. Came to the cabling part, usually we spent a lot of effort for cable management on Gigabits Ethernet and FC cabling, for Cisco UCS, maximum 8 cables per chassis for IO uplink. Of course, I do not require to over provision in this case, I managed to connect 4 FCoE connections from the chassis to the UCS 6120 Cluster for demo purpose and it is more than enough to handle the IO requirement for the showcase.

Well, when I move the box from my office to 2 different location in my country for event, it take me less than 1 hour to re-setup everything and boot up all the physical and virtual machine within the Cisco UCS.  It is really a great design to simplify a hardware setup and configuration. Guess what, I do have different engineer who are non server background that help me to re-setup and they were impressed with the design and took less than 5 mins to understand the architecture after my explanation.

Each server above will be connected to Nexus 5000 through CNA (Converge Network Adaptor) which provide FCoE and 10GE at the single connection. The Netapp FAS 3140 are connected to Nexus 5000 with FCoE interfaces which provide end to end solution from servers to switches, switches to storage. FC switch are not required to be in placed to allow servers communication to storage in this architecture. You can choose either NFS, FCoE or ISCSI in this configuration. The above picture is for reference and do not meant in very details as I am rush up the drawing about this post. EMC will soon officially launch the storage to support FCoE. I believe this will be the future strategy for Data Center & Storage solution. In Cisco UCS, you will still require FC switch in place as the UCS 6100 interconnect does not meant the full capable FCoE switch as Nexus 5000 did. I think the new architecture are suitable for new and clean deployment and large scale virtualization. It help to reduce the massive cabling, and achieve the throughput requirements needed by the virtualization.

Picture above is Traditional Network and SAN environment VS FCoE for reference purpose

As the picture show above, it is the high level architecture which requires to run the entire UCS solution from Cisco. Not necessary every environment will require Nexus 7000, it is meant for large scale networking environment. You may go with various different switches to replace the Nexus 7000 in the picture depend on your requirement. In the current UCS release, the UCS 6100 interconnect fabric will integrate with the MDS 9000 series Fiber Channel environment or others compatible FC switches. This allow UCS blade I/O to be consolidated with CNA with 10Gbps per connection as FCoE.  This had significant reduce the physical cabling requirement per blade chassis.

Is virtualization meant everything? Virtualization is not, but it had played the important role in the entire journey. Everyone may had faced different challenges during or after the server virtualization in the data center. The next thing which prompt up after server virtualization will often be I/O virtualization and utility computing model. I/O had become real challenges as server virtualization had increased the total bandwidth require to be allocated per physical servers which may easily contains 30 virtual machines in 1 single server. At the mean time, we often see the FC, ISCSI and NAS are seperated with the Ethernet LAN in data center.  Can we do it better? my answer is Definitely. Plenty of solutions today such as Xsigo or Cisco Nexus are really ready to address the challenges that everyone is facing today through Infiniband or FCoE.

FCoE had become an open standard as Qlogic, Emulex, Brocade and Cisco are officially supported today. Do we require to have multiple SAN cablings and Ethernet gigabits connected to each physical server? I will say Yes or No. For 90% of the environment, it should be the right thing to combine both FC and Ethernet into 1. I/O consolidation allowed everyone to simplify the data center environment and improve the bandwidth per connection from 1Gbps to 10Gbps for Ethernet and FC both. It help us to virtualize and simplify the I/O management within the data center.

Leave the technology away now, and look at the operation structure. How do we benefit from virtualization or private cloud computing? Virtualization had made a big move for many environments to go for the private cloud computing model. As my personal experience and the proven success in the past, the biggest benefit I had experienced was the way it transform the IT Services delivery. It had allowed everyone to work closely and demonstrated a better team work and understanding to delivery the right infrastructure for the business needs. Back to the traditional situation, the virtualization implementation team will have to deal with storage team, server team, application team, DBA, Network folks and others IT personnel within the organization, which require a long journey to kick off the virtualization project. We always noticed that for each individual functional team will have different standards, opinions and road maps for specified technology. We understood that standardization is always important, but it will require to further fine tune when it come to the virtualization, cloud computing and data center transformation era.

The collabration within each IT functional team had been improved due to the virtualization and cloud computing.  Everyone started to learn or understand about both virtualization and cloud computing. Infrastructures and solutions build today are always collaborate and align within different functional team to achieve the company goal. Is there a threat for server, network and storage guys due to virtualization and cloud computing? I will say NO, but it does help to improve the relation within the team and allow them to learn from each others. A pure networking background IT folk had known more about storage and servers technology because virtualization.

This picture had explained the relationship within the IT solutions. With the changes happen today, it allow IT to do more with less. It does simplify the IT infrastructure  and improve the services delivery.

This picture is a good reference which allow us to understand where are we now.