I spent two weeks over at the Ask the Expert forums, and I came to the realization that often our customers are bombarded with facts, figures, speeds, feeds, features, buzzwords, comparisons and functionalities for which they’re not sure which ones they must have while others they can live without or are a convenience. So I figured I’d toss out what I think are the top features for building an MDS Storage Area Network. Some may be obvious and others you might shake your head or light up the torches. They’re not in any particular order as your mileage varies from mine. I’ll probably skip those that are obvious like “hot swap power supplies” and other oh so exciting abilities…
The first set I usually refer to as the holy trinity of features as they constitute the foundation of the connectivity… VSANs, Port-Channels and TE Ports. They’ve been around literally forever on the platform and for good reason, they’ve been part of the hardware’s DNA since it’s inception. Additionally, if you walk down the hall to the folks that manage your LAN, you’ll find out that they’re using pretty much the same concepts and features as you (VLANs, Port/Ether-Channels and Trunking or 802.1q). So, if those guys are managing hundreds or thousands of switches and routers, there’s probably something worthwhile here. It’s also a pretty good chance that they are using them for the very same reasons that you are:
Port-Channels: High Availability and load-balancing of InterSwitch Links (ISL)
TE_Ports: The ability to run multiple VSANs over the same ISL leveraging frames tagged with the VSAN ID and enforced in hardware.
Next on my list is NPV Mode aka N_Port Virtualization. I grew up in the era of 16 port SAN switches and like rabbits, they multiplied, and so did their domains, and don’t get me started on the upgrades… You had top of rack designs that involved dozens of small switches and this tsunami of small switches was slowed down by the emergence of the high density directors with hundreds of ports, first 128 then 256 now over 500. Lots of small switches met their demise..
At Cisco Live London 2012, we announced that the Nexus 1000Vdistributed virtual switch (DVS) architecture will scale to support 10K+ ports across hundreds of servers. This is a multi-fold increase over our current support of 2K ports and 64 servers. What is driving the need to scale? Two reasons: More VMs and broader VM mobility.
The number of VMs is growing leaps and bounds in data centers and cloud computing environments, which in turn is driving the need to scale virtual switch ports. Depending on who you ask, we have already reached or are about to reach the tipping point where 50% of enterprise workloads have been virtualized. In most IT environments today, you get a VM by default for computing needs; to run an app on a bare metal physical server requires special approval. And needless to say, Moore’s Law continues to drive dense multi-core CPUs with extended memory architectures – thus enabling many more virtual machines to be instantiated on a single physical server. We have seen UCS customers deploy 10 – 30 VMs per server for production workloads, and 50+ (in some cases 100+) VMs per server for non-production workloads and virtual desktops. Increased adoption of public cloud computing resources, as well as growing deployments of private clouds in enterprises is also rapidly increasing the VM count. Also, customers often assign multiple vNICs per VM, e.g. a NIC for data traffic, another for management, a third for backup and so on. These factors are contributing to increased demand for virtual Ethernet (vEth) ports on the Nexus 1000V DVS. Read More »
Did you catch the news today? As Cisco and VMware continue to collaborate in transforming virtual desktops into virtual workspaces, we reached an important milestone – an agreement to sell VMware View 5 software as part of an integrated VXI offer to our customers. Read More »
Expanding its Big Data portfolio, Cisco announced a fully integrated end-to-end hardware and software infrastructure for enterprise Hadoop deployments in partnership with Greenplum, a division of EMC, that delivers industry-leading performance, scalability, advanced management capabilities and enterprise-class service and support. This solution consists of Cisco UCS 6200 Series Fabric Interconnects, Cisco UCS C-Series rack mount servers and Greenplum MR. Greeplum MR is based on the MapR M5 distribution, a completely re-engineered implementation of the Apache Hadoop stack with 100 percent compatibility. Cisco UCS is the exclusive integrated platform for Greeplum MR that can significantly reduce time-to-value and the operating expenses associated with Hadoop implementations.
Hadoop implementations can present a number of challenges to enterprise environments, many of these arise from the dichotomy between the introduction of innovative new technology and the enterprise-class performance, reliability, and support demanded by mission-critical systems. The collaboration between Cisco and Greenplum is specifically designed to provide a solution to these challenges. The joint solution delivers radically simplified deployment and management, high availability, excellent performance, exceptional scalability, and world-class service and support from long-time collaborators Cisco and EMC.
This solution can also connect, across the same management plane, to other Cisco UCS deployments running enterprise applications, thereby radically simplifying data center management and connectivity.
The configuration starts in a single rack with the ability to extend into multiple racks.
Cloud Connect is (as you might expect) all about cloud. At VMware Partner Exchange, you’ll learn about virtual desktops, virtual workspaces, and VXI with Cisco and VMware View. But you can also learn about more about Cisco and VMware’s complementary cloud management solutions – to help our customers accelerate their journey to cloud computing.
You may have heard about the Cisco IT internal private cloud (CITEIS – Cisco IT Elastic Infrastructure Services) by now. At VMworld last fall, our IT team gave a presentation on how they deployed Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud together with VMware vSphere and vCloud Director for this successful initiative:
If you’re at VMware Partner Exchange this year, you’ll have an opportunity to learn how we did it, how it works, why it delivered great results, and how you can deploy a similar solution. Just make sure you visit Cisco in booth 308 to see a demo of cloud management with Intelligent Automation – and attend our sessions below.
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One of my favorite books is The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follet, I’ve read it and reread it many times and each time I read it I get something new out of it. With so many good books out there it seems silly to reread a book, especially a very long book. I think what it is, is that the story is so good, the characters so compelling that I don’t want to leave them and when I’m finished with the book I miss them. Fortunately the book was made into a mini-series that I enjoyed and brought a nice visualization of the story. I also think the mini-series may have attracted a new set of readers in the viewing audience.
New audiences come with new methods of distribution for the same, similar or different presentation of an already published work. With the intent to reach a new audience I am republishing a UCS XML API focused blog from another blog site on Cisco Developer NetworkUCS Section. I wrote this blog in April 2010, but the methods utilized seemed to flow from my prior entries on this site.The previously published blog has references to other blogs on the on the Cisco Developer Network site in the Cisco UCS section.
The previous blog…
Last time I wrote about using telnet to connect to the UCS Manager XML API as a way to introduce the API and show it’s lack of complexity. Now I don’t expect anyone to write an application that uses telnet to manage a UCS system, I just wanted to get across that if text, XML structured text, can be pushed across an open port to the listening API process on the UCS then it doesn’t matter how the push is done.
However telnet is not very practical, so I thought I would write about curl and xmlstarlet (xmlstarlet referred to as xml in this entry). curl is used to handle the request and response cycle with the UCS and xml is used to process the XML response. In some of my early scripts I used sed and awk to “parse” the output. I say parse but it was more pattern matching; by the way sed and awk are great tools, but maybe I’m partial to them because I’ve been around for a while. The reason I started with curl, sed and awk was not because I lacked XML experience but because I wanted to appeal to the administrators out there and show that XML experience, while beneficial, is not specifically needed.
In an earlier part of my career I learned the extreme importance of Workload Automation, aka Job Scheduling. Workload automation is the oldest IT technology on the planet coming from the need to schedule jobs on an IBM Mainframe. Job Scheduling has evolved from driving JCL (Job Control Language) to Workload Automation where the Scheduler stitches together batch and real time activities across mainframes, proprietary OS systems, x86 systems, applications (both packages and commercial off the shelf such as SAP or Oracle or Informatica) and now web service enabled applications whether they be onsite or in the cloud. Walk into the operations center of any data driven company and you will see multiple screens where operations are monitoring the state of these jobs. Why are they so critical? Over 50% of all transactions that occur on this planet are batch in nature. They are scheduled based upon specific times or based upon dependencies being met. These workloads can be a complex and interrelated set of activities. Effectively these job streams are the business processes that drive modern enterprises.
Without these jobs companies don’t get information (and large amounts of it) in the right place at the right time. Most companies today could not close out their financial quarters without enterprise schedulers to move data from their disparate systems into a consolidate place for either the general ledger to close out or for a critical Business Intelligence report to run to drive placement of the correct product into the specific physical location to serve the global economy. Workload automation tools open and close stock exchanges and process all the transaction data from trades. They also drive compliance checks. This is important stuff for the global economy! This was my realization in touring key operations centers and realizing that half of the big monitors were covering the movement of batch data in the enterprise.
It’s actually BOTH, which I’ll get to in a minute… First, are you going to VMware Partner Exchange?Planning out your agenda for next week? If so, you’ve got some great opportunities to learn about VXI with VMware. Before we get to the good stuff, I want to highlight something that we often get asked, namely the difference between VXI and desktop virtualization, ie: the title of this post! Read More »
Next week is Cloud Connect in Santa Clara and Cisco’s Cloud Software group will have a big presence.
While we have plenty to talk about on how Cisco is helping customers build their cloud, we also want to listen to our customers plans and needs. We are bringing some of our engineers and architects so you can engage directly with them. There are three things you can see next week.
CITEIS -- Cisco’s, in production, private cloud.
See how it was built, the results in agility and cost, and best of all see a demo. Not a fake demo but the real thing.
Of course, we will also be showcasing our award winning cloud automation software, Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (CIAC) (formerly newScale and Tidal), which provides the self-service catalog and orchestration to our private cloud
It’s clearly evident from the evolution of technology that the “need for speed” seems to be deeply embedded in human nature. Reflecting back without going too far back in history, the horse and buggy was the main mode of transportation, unfortunately not fast enough. So we invented the locomotive, automobile, airplane, fax machine, e-mail, and mobile phones with text messaging among the hundreds of other inventions to fulfill our need to do things faster.
Being a networking guy, I might be biased, but I see networks as the new frontier for speed, especially now that we are a media/information driven society. It wasn’t long ago that a 10Mbps shared Ethernet LAN and 56kbps WAN links were considered fast (showing my age here). However, every time faster networking speeds were introduced, newer applications quickly consumed the capacity driving the need for even higher speeds.
Over the years we’ve seen Ethernet speeds increase in increments of 10x starting with 10Mbps to 100Mbps to 1GE and 10GE and now, we’re again at another speed inflection point -100Gigabit Ethernet! This week Cisco added to our 100GE router portfolio (CRS and ASR routers) with the announcement of a 100GE M2-Series module for the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series switches. Along with the 100GE module, we also announced a 40GE M2-Series module for the Nexus 7000 and a 40GE module for the Catalyst 6500.
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Everyone is talking about the Cloud but many companies are just beginning their journey and want a guide to ensure the quickest and most cost-effective path. Questions arise such as “can we build a cloud in-house?” which is kind of like taking a bus to your destination if you don’t have expertise at your company. Others ponder “should we hire a partner to advise us?” which is the equivalent to taking a jet because an expert will quickly fly you to the cloud, leveraging knowledge that has accumulated through experience. The jet will get you there a lot faster with less bumps and obstacles.
Companies like Discovery and Innovest Systems have reached their destination to the cloud with the help of the Savvis Symphony Cloud Solution. To securely keep up with massive growth while aligning costs to revenue opportunities, Innovest Systems has been utilizing Savvis cloud solutions for more than six years.
Savvis delivers a complex, fully managed infrastructure for Discovery Communications to support its real-time advertising deliverables, ad sales, scheduling, and programming for all its international operations.
Positioned as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Savvis delivers a leading-edge solution that results in costs savings for its customers.
“We help customers with cost-affordable, reliable IT infrastructure services so that they can focus on applications that are differentiating them in their markets,” says Bryan Doerr, Chief Technology Officer, Savvis.
The Savvis cloud solution offers enterprise customers unprecedented flexibility in controlling how much applications costs and how effectively those applications are delivered to end users.
Savvis started with an IP Next-Generation Network (IP NGN) that is world class in both its network architecture and service delivery capabilities. Building on this foundation, Savvis then turned its attention to the infrastructure side of the data center.
Its vision led Savvis to create a unique cloud-based service, offering enterprise-required services, not just compute virtualization. The solution is designed to meet the broadest range of global computing needs which allows Savvis customers to focus on innovation, competitive advantage, and growth by freeing up IT resources.
Cisco has been part of the Savvis journey to cloud. Cisco Services helped Savvis create their cloud offering, achieve their goals, and realize the full value of its investment in data center and cloud solutions. This included, but was not limited to, an 18 month roadmap aligned with Savvis’ technology and business goals.
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Cisco has just released a customer case study (PDF) of CareCore National, a 1200 person healthcare insurance company located in South Carolina. CareCore’s use case demonstrates how Cisco’s Virtual Security Gateway (VSG) for the Nexus 1000V can be used in a virtualized data center to logically isolate virtual machines running on shared application servers to meet compliance requirements. Read More »
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We invited Mike Taylor, Vice President of global infrastructure engineering and operations at Savvis, to provide his insight on Savvis’ journey to the cloud. Read below for what he has to say. Check out related blog for an additional perspective.
If you’ve been following the cloud services market, you’ve likely heard the term “enterprise cloud” proclaimed by various vendors. But really, what does that mean? How do you differentiate an enterprise cloud from a mass market option?
At Savvis, a CenturyLink company, we love talking about our enterprise cloud offerings and what distinguishes them from the mass market clouds that continue to flood the marketplace.
First, let me be clear: In some areas, enterprise and mass market clouds are the same. Benefits for both include flexibility, quick provisioning of compute power and a virtualized and scalable environment. However, it’s important to note that enterprise clouds also provide a range of security options, unprecedented speed-to-market and vastly improved collaboration between the end-user and the vendor.
Savvis’ enterprise cloud is a VMware-based service differentiated by an array of built-in security features, as well as many optional managed security capabilities. Savvis built its cloud solutions using the same trusted suppliers – including Cisco – used by enterprise customers in their own data centers. Our cloud services are divided into tiers, providing different levels of performance and availability for different types of application needs. These services are delivered in a multitenant way and can also be delivered as a single tenant.
So how do you realize the promise of enterprise cloud infrastructure? My colleague Steve Garrou, vice president of global solutions management at Savvis, recently shared on the Savvis blog a list of items that should be addressed when considering a move to enterprise cloud. Rather than reinvent the wheel, here are the items that Steve outlined:
Decide whether you are going to maintain two infrastructures or consolidate.
Understand what applications are currently running in the existing environment and expectations for moving certain solutions to the cloud.
Analyze the architecture of the application environments.
Determine how much capacity you need to run the applications; are the capacity requirements seasonal or variable?
Assess compliance and security requirements.
Years ago – before “enterprise cloud” was common terminology – Cisco and Savvis shared a vision for a cloud service that offered enterprise-required services, not simply compute virtualization. That vision became reality two years ago when we launched Savvis Symphony Virtual Private Data Center, one of the industry’s first enterprise-class, multi-tenet cloud solutions. A key element of the cloud architecture was the Cisco Unified Computing System.
Partnering with trusted companies like Cisco helps Savvis set the bar for enterprise cloud. I recently sat down with Cisco to talk about our collaboration. You can see the results of those conversations in the case study and video.
