I’m very pleased to welcome a new member to the Cisco USNIC/MPI Team: Dave Goodell.  Welcome, Dave!  (today was his first day)

Dave joins us from the MPICH team at Mathematics and Computer Science division at Argonne National Laboratory.

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Tags: HPC, mpi

Cisco continues its cloud computing performance leadership with the announcement of VMware® VMmark™ 2.5 benchmark result published on May 9^th 2013. The Cisco UCS C240 M3 Rack Server’s score of 12.00@10 tiles on the VMware VMmark 2.5 benchmark represents the best cloud computing performance of any 2-socket server in a 2-node configuration as measured by the VMware VMmark 2.5 benchmark

The VMware VMmark 2.5 benchmark uses a tiled design that incorporates six real-world workloads to calculate a virtualization score. Then it includes VMware vMotion, Storage vMotion, and virtual machine provisioning times to calculate an infrastructure score. The combination of these scores is the total benchmark score. 

The system used to achieve this performance included the Cisco UCS C240 M3 Rack Server powered by Intel® Xeon® processors and an industry-leading approach to storage: a Cisco UCS server-based Fusion‑io ION Data Accelerator solution that turns the server into a storage system. The Fusion-io ION Data Accelerator turns Cisco UCS servers equipped with Fusion-io ioMemory into highly available, transparently scalable, shared storage appliances.

For additional insights on the benchmark configuration check the “Cisco UCS C240 M3 Rack Server Delivers World-Record Cloud Computing Performance” Performance Brief. You can also download the official VMware® VMmark™ V 2.5   benchmark disclosure and configuration details at http://www.vmware.com/a/assets/vmmark/pdf/2013-05-09-Cisco-C240M3.pdf

 

With this world-record-setting   VMmark 2.5 benchmark score of 12.00@10 tiles Cisco UCS has delivered the best cloud computing performance of any 2-socket server in a 2-node configuration as measured by the VMware VMmark 2.5 benchmark outperforming solutions from AMD, Dell, Fujitsu, and HP. Whether a virtualized data center or a public or private cloud is needed, this VMware VMmark 2.5 benchmark result indicates the degree to which the Cisco UCS can accelerate applications while delivering virtualization and infrastructure performance and agility for cloud computing environments

Better infrastructure yields better performance. With innovations such as unified fabric, large memory capacity, expansion capabilities, and the low-latency performance of Fusion-io ioMemory and ION Data Accelerator software, Cisco’s results demonstrate the architectural advantages of a system built for virtualized environments.

VMware VMmark is a product of VMware, Inc. The comparative results cited in this document were available at http://www.vmmark.com and were valid as of May 9th, 2013..

Girish Kulkarni

Senior Marketing Manager

Unified Computing System 

gikulkar@cisco.com

Tags: Benchmark Performance, Cisco UCS, cloud_computing, performance, virtualization, VMmark

A Twitter success story
Theresa Russell teaches Computing to teenagers in Lancashire, England.  We found each other on Twitter.  I was looking to better understand the newest trends in #EdTech.  She needed a female mentor for an international competition she had talked five students into joining.  We soon formed a team of teachers, mentors, and more importantly, students: TechGirlsUK.  With the energetic support of the inimitable Heidi Rhodes, the girls made it to London.

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Tags: edtech, education, girlsintech, social media, stem, twitter

We handed out a stack of these buttons for the Cisco booth staff to wear this year and that sums up my favorite part of EMC World:  it’s an infrastructure party.  This is a place where you’re going to talk with people at the heart of the data center and IT, and the conversations all start there.

Our alignment with EMC couldn’t be any clearer than what we had on display last week. VBlock continues to rock and roll and Trey Layton of VCE summed that up quite nicely here.   On the VSPEX front, Cisco recently released 7 new and updated integrated infrastructure designs that combine UCS, Nexus and VNX Storage.  Moreover, Cisco offers these as single-part-number SmartPlay Solution Pak bundles that make them even easier for our partners and customers to order.   Cisco’s VSPEX offerings span the gamut on choice of virtualization platform and application, paving that second of the three paths to cloud we talked about at EMCworld.

Cisco Virtualization Solution for EMC VSPEX with VMware vSphere 5.1 for 50 Virtual Machines

Cisco Virtualization Solution for EMC VSPEX VMware vSphere 5.1 for 100, 125, and 250 Virtual Machines

Cisco Virtualization Solution for EMC VSPEX with Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V for 50 Virtual Machines

Cisco Solution for EMC VSPEX: Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track 3.0 Enterprise Medium M250

Cisco Desktop Virtualization Solution for EMC VSPEX with VMware View 5.1.2 for 500 and 2000 Desktops

Cisco Desktop Virtualization Solution for EMC VSPEX with Citrix XenDesktop 5.6 for 500 Desktops

Cisco Solution for EMC VSPEX: Microsoft SharePoint 2010

On a product front the big news for Cisco was the new MDS 9710 and that brought a lot of visitors into the booth.  I was also really happy by the amount of people that came by to talk with us about UCS and the things we’re doing around data center automation.  Each year the conversation has changed and the evolution has been fun to experience:

2010

Customer: “What’s that funny looking switch there?”

Me: “That’s the Unified Computing System, are you familiar with Cisco’s new server platform?”

Customer:  “What? No, really, what’s that funny looking switch there??”

 2011/2012

Customer:  “Do you have any UCS on display here?  Our team in XYZ division just deployed it and I’d like to take a look”

Me: “Certainly, let me take you through an overview of the system”

 2013

Customer:  “Hey, I really like what you folks did with the switch-based Fibre Channel zoning in the last release of UCS Manager.  When does version 2.0 of UCS Central come out? We’re deploying UCS in three more data centers and I want to talk about implementing global ID pools”

Me:  “Fantastic.  Let me find our systems management expert.”

I speak geek pretty well, so when customers come in and want to go deeper than I can on operating the system instead of asking me “Cisco sells servers?”…I know we’re in the right place and on the right vector.   Thanks to the EMC and Cisco teams for putting on such a great event.

I’ll leave you with a photo here for a caption contest.  Leave your ideas in the comment section and try your best to keep it clean.  My first take is “I loved EMC World 2013 thiiiiiiiiiiiis much!”

Tags: data center, EMC, Servers, UCS, unified computing system, Vblock, vspex

Imagine a world where homosexuality is both natural and normal and heterosexuality is perceived and treated as a sinful aberration.

The award winning short film Love Is All You Need? powerfully depicts this world where “gay” is “straight” and “straight” is “gay” and a sexual relationship between a man and a woman is a cultural, social and religious taboo.

The film is told from the perspective of the heroic protagonist; young Ashley Curtis who is raised in the “picture perfect” middle class white American family: two moms, two grandparents, two uncles and a little brother. She lives in a society where “playing house” means two moms or two dads and their children, Romeo and Julio was written by Shakespeare for his secret female lover and anyone who is attracted to the opposite sex is labelled as a “disgusting breeder.” At the wedding of her two uncles Ashley is attracted to a young male flower boy and realises that she is not like the rest of her family. Her open heterosexuality subjects her to physical, verbal and emotionally abuse and the only hope she is given is to pray that this is “just a phase”.

The first time I watched the film, I couldn’t help but focus on how this film portrayed an alternative world where homosexuality was the norm. But as the film drew me in, I forgot this and my attention was centred on the extreme isolation and abuse Ashley was subjected to because she dared to be different. She is beaten up, becomes a victim of cyber-bullying and branded a “Hetero” with black marker pen because she has an innocent crush on a boy. I felt sympathetic to Ashley not because I am also heterosexual but because I admired her courageous and tenacity in the face of extreme abuse, bullying and love with boundaries.

As I was thinking about writing this blog, I knew I wanted to include not just my own experience but if/how the video touched people who are gay. I reached out to two people and they both thought the video was very powerful and a convincing depiction of what it’s like to be a homosexual in today’s world; the video brought back their own personal stories and experiences. It beautifully captures how your parents, teachers, friends and media are key influencers on whether you decide to come out about your sexuality as well as common misconceptions that homosexuality is just a “phase” that can be easily “corrected” if you just get yourself a girlfriend/boyfriend. On one hand the video is hopeful because we are making progress as a society but on the other hand it shows how important this issues is and how far we have to go. Take the recent news of Sir Gerald Howarth’s challenge to David Cameron to scrap the gay marriage bill and the death of Lucy Meadows, a transgender teacher who committed suicide following harassment by the media and other sources after she returned to school from winter break as a female.  Let us willingly share this video, let us talk about it so that one day stories like this become historical fiction.