Here is the video I uploaded for Stateless Computing on Cisco UCS which capture by my counterpart. Really thanks for his time to capture on this.

Or you can view from here.

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1. Stateless Computing from Cisco UCS
2. Stateless Computing from Cisco VS VMware vMotion or Cold Migration
3. Cisco UCS C Series Rack Server

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.

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

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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

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1. High Level Cisco UCS architecture
2. FCoE in the Data Center
3. Server Virtualization & Cloud Computing Model

Cisco UCS C Series Rack Server from Rodney Haywood on Vimeo.

If you have any issue with the video, probably you should check it out here or here.

Related posts:

1. Server Virtualization & Cloud Computing Model

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.

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1. FCoE in the Data Center
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1. Higher consolidation ratio in virtualization with the latest CPU, memory and servers performance
2. Higher capacity disk drive which significant reduce the number of storage expansion require
3. Virtual I/O which allow the higher utilization of the available bandwidth in data center
4. UCS to provide consolidation and higher capacity of bandwidth to support network and storage utilization in the data center

I may had not included all the facts here, but these should be good enough to point out the changing happening to the current market. I had been impressed with the IBM 3950 M2 previously but now, the Unisys alliances with VMware is another choice which provide similar features for the large environment which contains large number of machines running. The unisys Enterprise Server ES7000 could be the ideal machine in this case. 16 physical cpu sockets which contain 6 core each from Intel Xeon 7400 series of processor, and maximum of 1TB of memory with 8GB memory module in a single server. If we do a calculation, you should able to have 96 cores of CPUs in a single server. This will allow more virtual machine to be consolidated into it.

You can view here for more information about the hardware details.

So, with all the technology available, we should able to have our data center running with less number of server racks for servers, storage and networks. This had significant reduce the space require to run a data center, and allow the users to expand the life cycle of the data center in a longer term. If I have to choose to invest 1 Million on DC expansion VS 1 Million of Virtualization, servers and storage, I will definitely choose the 2nd option which provide additional capacity and reduce the space require by a data center. In a longer term, the real estate cost, power & cooling always cost us a big sum of dollars to keep the data center running.

In the near future, there will be 8 cores and 12 cores CPU in the future market. When it come to the time for us to refresh the current ESX servers which run on quad cores or 6 cores base server, the new servers capacity may be double the current servers that we using, and for sure it will allow more machine to be consolidated.