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Screen Shot 2013-09-09 at 12.59.59 PMIt’s a beautiful thing when you can hijack four not-quite random people off the VMworld show floor and get them to tackle a discussion on desktop virtualization.  And that’s exactly what we did a couple weeks back, when the opportunity presented itself.  With Courtney Burry (VMware), Mike Brennan (Cisco), Dave Kinsman (WWT) and myself on hand, we did a sort of VDI blogger “round-up”.  You should check out the video below, but a quick recap as follows:

  • Courtney discussed some of the latest improvements in Horizon View that improve desktop TCO by optimizing storage footprint through technologies like SE sparse (or Space Efficient Sparse) which provides the ability to reclaim blocks of storage that are unused or deleted by the guest file system.
  • I also shared some thoughts on our joint solution with VMware that’s expanding the number of use cases addressable by VDI, through our support of hardware-accelerated 3D Graphics with nVidia as part of our C-Series rack server solution, as well as the improving economics of 1:1 persistent desktop images using the latest generation of flash-based partner technologies we support through our VDI storage ecosystem.
  • Mike discussed how we’re offering a more consolidated management approach with VMware through things like integration within vCenter which includes a snap-in for UCS, allowing administrators to see our UCS infrastructure inside the vCenter web client as well as open API’s that introduce more opportunities for automation, which combined with combine with UCS Manager and our automation tools, can help our customers provision desktops from bare metal, much faster.
  • And to help round-out the round-up, we snagged Dave Kinsman from WWT, to give us his feedback on how he sees all of this coming together, both for channel partners like WWT, and they customers they serve.

 



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Evolving Cisco UCS for Big Data and the Internet of Everything
Image credit: imediaconnection.com

In an earlier blog, I discussed the incredible success behind the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) in Darwinian evolutionary terms.  Since I wrote that blog three months ago, we’ve continued to grow rapidly and have strengthened our position as the #2 blade server player worldwide from 19.3% to 21.5% revenue share (per IDC 2CQ2013 server market tracker, September 2013), with 33.9% revenue share in the US.

Prediction – The #1 spot is well within our reach sooner than you may think.

As we grow our installed base with roughly 1,000 new customers every month, our conversations about the future of UCS have taken an interesting turn. Until now in what I’ll call the “UCS 1.0” phase, Cisco focused on virtualization and private cloud as the dominant use cases that were top-of-mind for industry CIOs and we struck a resonant chord based on our growth – just look at our numbers.

We were market makers with expanded-memory 2-socket Intel EX blades (remember the B230’s?), which were gobbled up like candy into large-scale VDI deployments much to the surprise of the industry. We also jump-started a very attractive RISC-to-x86 migration practice, including Cisco IT’s own production environment: a 40TB mission-critical database that ran on HP Superdomes – a “circle of life” moment for me since Superdome was my program from 1999-2003.

We’ll continue leading in customer value for our original design centers, but we are now focusing on market expansion with what we call “UCS 2.0”, expanding into data-intensive, mission critical, analytics and service provider cloud environments with an increased level of R&D funding and strong corporate support from our top executives.

Prediction – You’ll see us more focused on architectural solutions for key industry vertical markets with tuned solution environments that leverage Cisco’s wide portfolio and that of our partners.

One such act of support is the announcement today of our intent to acquire WHIPTAIL, a leading solid-state systems company that boasts the highest scalability in performance and capacity of any scale-out flash vendor on the market today.  WHIPTAIL systems span from single-node entry products to 30-node behemoths that drive almost 400TB’s of flash, 40GB/sec of bandwidth and 4 million random R/W IOPS – for starters.

Prediction: Cisco will unseat Infiniband with low-latency Ethernet fabrics. Check out our USNIC technology for starters…

In our customer interactions it became very clear they view application acceleration using persistent solid-state memory as a use case that belongs in the server tier, not the storage tier.

In an application-centric world, we started thinking not about server vs. storage infrastructure, but how applications viewed data – hot “important right now” data, warm “may be of interest data” and cold “let’s keep it around for background mining or compliance” data.

We arrived at the conclusion that UCS needed to be best-in-class at accelerating hot data layers. Hot data is closest to applications and therefore has high affinity for the server tier.  Hence WHIPTAIL.

Assertion: Flash is a “boundary technology” that can be viewed as part of the memory or storage hierarchy. With respect to storage it’s faster and more expensive per GB. With respect to DRAM memory it’s slower but cheaper per GB. It therefore allows cost/performance arbitrage for applications by applying an accelerated persistent data model that can save on DRAM and de-complicate underlying permanent backing stores.

WHIPTAIL is a great fit with the fabric computing UCS architecture and also complementary to our C-Series rack mount servers and our SingleConnect capability in our UCS Manager that allows mixed-density blade/rack deployments to be managed from a common pane of glass.

Our intent is to fully integrate UCS computing and WHIPTAIL solid-state technologies over a Nexus fabric to create scalable persistent memory systems. That’s our vision.

Why? Because customers will be able to do things they could not before. Such as loading vast amounts of data in seconds and minutes, not hours or days – or – shrinking their performance footprint to a rack vs. 30 racks – or – accelerating Hadoop on all solid-state infrastructure – or – extending in-memory analytics to a scale previously not thought possible. That’s why.

As converged infrastructure advances as an ensemble computing architecture, boundary technologies like solid-state memory can be viewed as part of the memory or the storage hierarchy. Cisco’s point of view is to make it part of the memory hierarchy in the compute tier. That allows customers the best of both worlds – performance acceleration for applications while retaining their investment in permanent backing stores and simplifying their overall data center total cost of ownership (TCO).

To close on a Darwinian note, if UCS existed in the Cretaceous Period it would have been a Velociraptor  (meaning ‘swift seizer’)– sleek, fast and ferocious – eating everything in its path.  Velociraptors are believed to have hunted in packs, which is great considering the strong partner ecosystem that Cisco and UCS have built with industry leaders like EMC, NetApp and VCE as shining examples. We are committed to maintaining and expanding our hunting pack – more on that later!

if Cisco UCS existed in the Cretaceous Period it would have been a Velociraptor
if Cisco UCS existed in the Cretaceous Period it would have been a Velociraptor. Image credit: dark.pozadia.org


Authors

Paul Perez

Senior Vice President, General Manager

Chief Technology Officer, Data Center Group

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The Internet of Everything is delivering profound changes to the world. By 2017 there will be more than 19 billion networked devices globally – bringing a deluge of data on today’s IT environments. Against this backdrop, we are witnessing a move from the Web Economy of the early 2000s to the App Economy of today, and with this transformation, data center architectures are evolving from the Web 2.0 tiered architectures of the past to the Application-Centric Infrastructure of tomorrow. As the importance of the application grows, so does the need for high performance systems to be optimized to support emerging and business critical workloads.

Cisco is evolving UCS to keep pace with the changes brought about by the Internet of Everything and the App Economy.  Today, Cisco is announcing its intent to acquire WHIPTAIL. Based in Whippany, New Jersey, WHIPTAIL builds the highest performing and most scalable solid-state memory systems available today. Scalable from one node to up to 30 nodes, WHIPTAIL systems can deliver over four million IOPS and 360 Terabytes of raw capacity – a truly staggering amount of solid-state performance capable of providing the workload optimization required in the App Economy.

By making this acquisition, Cisco is enhancing the Unified Computing System (UCS) by bringing solid-state memory acceleration into the compute tier as a managed subsystem.  WHIPTAIL is a perfect architectural fit for UCS because together the two combine a clustered architecture with fabric-based acceleration – all of which is automatable via the UCS Manager and UCS Director. The end result is to deliver optimized performance on top of UCS for emerging and business critical applications, such as virtualized, Big Data, database, High Performance Computing and transcoding workloads.

Since its introduction in 2009, Cisco UCS has grown to become the leading fabric computing system and the number two x86 blade server platform worldwide.  By converging compute onto the fabric through what is widely recognized as a truly innovative server architecture, UCS has been able to capture 73 world record application performance benchmarks and achieve one of the highest growth rates of any product platform in history.  And by bringing solid-state performance into the compute tier, WHIPTAIL speeds a natural evolution of the fabric computing domain and drastically improves performance for customers’ current business-critical application environments.

We couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity to continue driving UCS leadership with the addition of WHIPTAIL.  Stay tuned for more details in the weeks and months to come.  And welcome WHIPTAIL!

 



Authors

Hilton Romanski

No Longer with Cisco

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Like most industries, security has gone through many different evolutions. Over the past 20 years, the industry has been largely product focused, with customers deploying point products across the network in an effort to “cover” all security gaps. Over time and with the arrival of mobile, social and cloud, customers now recognize that having all the security products in the world is not going to close all the gaps. Today’s customers are looking for fully integrated solutions – a combination of services, products and people.

This is where Cisco delivers. We are elevating our security solutions efforts with the creation of a Services Security Practice, led by security industry veteran Bryan Palma, who comes to Cisco with an extensive background in both services and security. Reporting to Edzard Overbeek, Senior Vice President of Cisco Services, Bryan’s team will build three new service categories for our customers: Consultation; Product Implementation and Support; and Managed Services for enterprises and governments.

Cisco’s integrated security strategy is to defend, discover and remediate the most critical threats. With world-class products, research teams, global intelligence, advanced threat protection – and now services – our customers will benefit from continuous security in more places across the infrastructure.

Continue reading “#ExecInsights: Defend, Discover and Remediate with Security Services”



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Have you ever felt like measuring social media was like a trying to crack a secret code? Sometimes it’s difficult to figure out what data is important to measure out of all the information we are receiving.

September 26th Let's Chat! #Ciscosmt Twitter Chat
September 26th Let’s Chat! #Ciscosmt Twitter Chat

And as social media continues to become more of the way business is conducted, I’ve seen a shift in what experts are focusing on and recommending.

Join me and our special guest,  Charlie Treadwell, Manager, Digital and Social Media Marketing at Cisco, for a #Ciscosmt Twitter chat on Thursday, September 26th from 9-10am PT. As part of our monthly “Let’s Chat! #Ciscosmt Series” chats, Charlie will share his listening, measurement, and monitoring expertise and we will:

  • Discuss ways to make sense of all the social media metrics
  • Share measurement, listening, and monitoring best practices
  • Identify metrics to focus on
  • Explore examples showing social media measurement’s impact on business
  • Determine how to make sense of all of the data
  • Review ways to up-level measurement practices in a company
Let's Chat! #Ciscosmt Series Measurement Twitter Chat
Let’s Chat! #Ciscosmt Series

 

Let’s make this a really interactive session. Bring your questions for Charlie and share your own insights and examples throughout the chat or even prior to the session. We’re looking forward to your interactions!

 

For those that might be new participating in a Twitter chat, here are some quick details:

What is a Twitter Chat?
Twitter chats are scheduled gatherings of Twitter users to discuss a given topic, using a hashtag to keep track of conversation.

How do I participate?

  • There are many ways to participate in a Twitter chat. You can use a dedicated chat platform, (i.e. Twubs, TweetChat, Tchat.io, etc.), your favorite Twitter client (TweetDeck, Hootsuite, etc.) or you can even just user Twitter search to follow the chat hashtag.
  • We want it to be an interactive chat, learning from each other. Join in the conversation with your insights and experiences using #Ciscosmt. And also interact with others, re-tweeting, exchanging ideas, and commenting on other points of view.
  • Questions will be labeled Q1, Q2, Q3. If you are responding to a question, please start your tweet with the corresponding answer number “A1”.

Cisco Social Media Training Program Opportunity:

If you have any questions or are interested in other types of social media training, check out our complimentary Cisco Social Media Training Program and follow the #ciscosmt hashtag.  To request  customized one-on-one team training sessions, email ciscosmtraining@external.cisco.com.

We look forward to your insights here and during the #Ciscosmt Twitter chat!



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In the last article, we looked at the big picture of what is involved in creating a SAN distance extension. In this article, we’re going to take a slightly closer look at the physical requirements and with luck we’ll be able to clear up some general confusion and misconceptions along the way.

Puzzle Pieces 2There is a lot of information about these different elements available via a quick search on your favorite search engine. What I find, though, is that there is usually very little context that accompanies the descriptions or, at best, the authors assume that you may have more of an understanding about some of these technologies than you do. In this case, if I’m going to err it will likely be on the side of making it too accessible and in Plain English, which is something I can live with.

As usual, this is a mid-level view. There are many deep dives that will go into each subject in fine-toothed detail available on the web, but we’re going to stay focused on what you need to know for extending SANs across distances.

Again, this is a rather long post, but hopefully it will be useful as a reference point for you. Continue reading “Storage Distance by Protocol, Part II – Physical Layer”



Authors

J Metz

Sr. Product Manager

Data Center Group

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HPC on Wall StreetAt this years’ 2013 High Performance Computing on Wall Street once again the greatest minds from the financial services industry gathered to discuss the latest technology trends that give financial firms a technology edge in accessing information in real-time to better predict where markets are going and the best areas to invest.

Many vendors delivered their latest innovation data analytics software that can analyze market data in real-time, but without the right infrastructure, traders can be delayed in executing on that information. Trading smarter is the key underlying theme by which the fabric can provide greater transparency and enhance application delivery that impacts the business. Continue reading “Wall Street and Data Analytics, They Are Only As Good As The Network That Connects Them”



Authors

Dave Malik

Cisco Fellow and Chief Architect

Customer Experience

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#GameChanger is the one word we used to describe the new branch router: ISR 4451-X.  We said it was designed from the ground up with rich services and application delivery in mind.  How did we do that?  Two words: Service Containers.

Service Containers are embedded into the router hardware itself, making it easy for you to manage and operate network services and applications.  Services and applications are protected within each container, making it possible for each service to perform at the level that you need to, but also gives you the flexibility as its embedded nature entails.  And since these containers can talk to each other even if they are on a separate device, you get high availability for your branch automatically. Continue reading “Webinar: Service Containers Transforms the Router”



Authors

Allison Park

Product Marketing Manager

Enterprise Networks

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One critical factor to stay ahead in today’s dynamic and competitive video market is the agility to deploy new services and hardware fast.

But what do service providers really need in order to be agile?

An open client software is a great start. It provides a core software base so service providers can focus on innovating rather than handling fundamental software components. It is continually enhanced by the developer community and easy to integrate with hardware and software components from third-parties or the open software community.

A fine example of open software for video CPE is the RDK (Reference Design Kit). Originally begun by Comcast two years ago, RDK is evolving into a standardized open software base for the industry. It is enjoying growing support from a broad community of Service Providers, SoC, OEMs, software vendors, and system integrators. It provides a shared set of software components for QAM, IP, and hybrid devices. And it has a modular, layered architecture for easy hardware and software updates.

As an open software that enables agility, RDK ticks all the right boxes.

But to realize that agility—that is, to actually bring new services and platforms to market at a rapid pace with success—service providers need a partner with the right expertise, resources, and software components

What does this entail? Continue reading “What Does It Take to Stay Ahead in Today’s Dynamic and Competitive Video Market?”