I was busy setup the demo solution for the Cisco summit yesterday. The Demo we had were displaying the VMware, Cisco UCS, Nexus 5000, MDS 9124 & Netapp Storage Solution. 1 of the Surprise thing happened during the setup, which the power source for our MDS 9124 had been tripped during the installation yesterday. In this scenerio, all our connection to ESX host and VM were disconnected. It took us for 25 mins to recovered the power failure and the MDS Switch was back on line after that. I was thought to reboot all the ESX host as we are performing BOOT FROM SAN for all the ESX hosts that we setup. Surprise happened here, which I found all the ESX host were still continue running. I did the command uptime and check the system uptime from vcenter, it showed that the ESX host were not rebooted during the SAN connection drop from UCS to our Netapp FAS storage.
I further checked the virtual machines been power on in the ESX servers, which show all the VM were continue running without system crash or rebooted. Now I realize that the failure on SAN switch may not necessary result system crash or hung, in fact it may allow you resume the system state once the SAN switch are back online, of course, this is no guarantee assumption, just some surprise finding experienced yesterday would like to share here. Read more »
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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Netapp had official release the virtual storage console for VMware ESX host. You can view more information from here.
If you are netapp existing customers, you can download the software from here
Below is the summary I link from Netapp official blog site
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FCoE will be the next trend for most users to be adopted. Previous post I had explain about the high level architecture from Cisco UCS. Here I will describe the FCoE end to end solution which is slightly different with the UCS architecture. Please note that both architecture is similar but it does not same to each others.
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