Cisco is going to launch the new generation Blade and Rack mount base machine which will bring another major changes to the x86 open system again.
According to the link here www.theregister.co.uk, it should able to push the total memory up to 1TB per 2 U machine in single chassis. The C260M2 will come with 2 x 10Gb Ethernet and 4 x gigabits NICs, which is very sufficient for most of the deployment today on stand alone or virtualize environment. Cisco claimed it will ship the B230 M2, B440M2 with Intel E-7 base chip set. Once again, I am very excited for this to reach the market as it will transform the server infrastructure and virtualization infrastructure deployment in the future.
If you are following Cisco Unified computing solution, here is some good news. The latest firmware version 1.4 is officially support direct attach FCoE Storage protocol without require the additional SAN switch as previous version. Both Netapp and EMC are officially supported and certified to direct attach with the Cisco UCS without a SAN switch require. This will reduce the complex layer it require to deploy especially for those environment who are not FC users previously.
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 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.
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.
