Data Center Networks October 2009 Archives

Wishful Thinking: The Innovation Edition

I am an unabashed fan of social networking.  For the data center team, being able to get direct, unfiltered feedback from the market has been a boon for making sure we are tracking in the right direction.  I also thoroughly enjoy the online conversations on the various blogs and in Twitter.  There are a great number of people out there with a lot of good thinking on the data center and I highly encourage you to do a little googling to get plugged into these conversations.  There are folks out there with views diametrically opposed to mine (you know who you are) but they have well-reasoned, well-spoken opinions and you can’t help but respect them for that—and I honestly enjoy the back-and-forth.

And then I’ll come across something that will leave me scratching my head thinking “Really…that’s the best you could come up with?”  I was reminded about this when I recently ran across a diatribe on our “lack of innovation”.  So, as a company, I will readily admit that there are a number of things we need to work on (and are), but “lack of innovation”? Really?

Let’s deconstruct this a little bit.  Just for the sake of argument, let’s start with a definition.  My trusty Mac dictionary defines “innovate” as “make changes in something established, esp. by introducing new methods, ideas, or products,” so lets run with that.  So, what have we done along these lines in the data center space in the last 20 months or so (not meaning to brag, just trying to make a point): 

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Posted by Omar Sultan at 06:09PM PST

Could the Converged Network Adapter be the most important element in a Unified Fabric?

Many vendors are touting the benefits of IEEE DCB, FCoE, CEE, DCE, Unified Fabrics, and many other marketing monikers for equipment consolidation.  Each component of the technology is interesting, but maybe no more so than the Converged Network Adapter itself.   Why so?  Let’s take a look.

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Posted by Frank D'Agostino at 09:07AM PST

Frank P. D’Agostino - CCIE 3461
Distinguished Systems Engineer II
Cisco Systems
twitter.com/fdagosti

Cisco Nexus 4001I Switch Module for IBM BladeCenter

On my previous blog post “What exactly is a Nexus 4000?” there were many questions/comments around OEM blade server vendors and details of Nexus 4000 Series Blade Switches . Today, IBM announced the details of the Cisco Nexus 4000 blade switch for their BladeCenter H and HT chassis.

Nexus 4001 Switch Module for IBM BladeCenter will provide the support for Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and the emerging IEEE Data Center Bridging (DCB) standards over 10 GbE for IBM Blade servers.

So IBM becomes the first blade server vendor to make Cisco Nexus 4000 available for their blade servers. You can find the Nexus 4000 blade switch IBM description at:

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/tips0754.html

and included in the IBM websites below:

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/hardware/openfabric/fcoe.html

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/hardware/openfabric/ethernet.html

and on the Cisco website:  http://www.cisco.com/go/nexus4000

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Posted by Kash Shaikh at 05:27PM PST

Cisco IT Data Center Experience

You know, our customers, even folks that are not our customers, are always interested what Cisco IT is up to.  Our IT strategy is intrinsic to our business strategy and folks are always curious to know what is working and what is not working.  Now, if you have every been lucky enough to hear folks like Rebecca Jacoby or Sidney Morgan talk, you know our IT org is a big believer in transparency and will happily share both our successes and learning experiences.  To that end, we have recently released the Cisco IT Data Center Experience.

The website takes you behind the scenes of Cisco’s global data center environment with a chance to hear from the folks responsible for long-term planning and strategy, architecture and operations and implementation.  There are over 30 videos on a broad range of topics—pretty much something for everyone.

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Posted by Omar Sultan at 09:56AM PST

Government Agency Upgrades Application Infrastructure with a Virtualized App Delivery Solution

Government Agency Upgrades Application Infrastructure…and by doing so provides a great proof point of  why old load balancers should be virtualized  (source: IDC) .

Faced with challenges of an aging application infrastructure and needing to scale application delivery state wide with security and performance, the Delaware Department of Technology and Information (DTI) deployed the industry’s only virtualized application delivery solution.

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Posted by Yogesh Rami at 09:21AM PST

Cisco UCS Gets the Nod From Oracle

So, we continue to see broad traction in the industry for the Cisco Unified Computing System.  The latest passenger on the UCS Bus is Oracle, which recently certified and validated the Cisco UCS platform for Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.3 and Oracle VM.  

As the picture illustrates, the test system was built around out UCS B-Series servers with EMC CLARiiON storage system with a mix of Fibre Channel drives and state- of-the-art Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs) to further speed performance.  Its important to note that, because the Cisco UCS is architecturally consistent across form factors, the same system could be built with the recently announced C-Series rack servers.

We have published a white paper on the tested deployment that digs into a fair amount of detail on the setup and configuration of the system—highly encouraged reading for anyone that supports Oracle in an enterprise environment.  Please note, you will need to register to access the doc (any follow-up from us is on an opt-in basis).

One of the more interesting things  things that came out of the testing was the performance data. We ran the cluster through 24h hrs stress tests for both OLTP (order entry) and DSS (sales history). The results included:

• Very consistent CPU utilization: around 40 percent on all eight nodes
• No saturation levels of any subsystems (CPU, disk, I/O, or networking)
• Sustained FCoE-based I/O ranging between 1.8 and 2.0 GB per second, which could be further divided into 1.4 GB per second of Fibre Channel I/O and approximately 450 MB per second of interconnect communication
• No occurrence of I/O bottlenecks or wait times
• Excellent I/O service times for storage

We attribute much of this consistency to the UCS architecture and its intrinsic 10GB fabric as well as the use of the EMC CLARiiON storage with EFDs.  Note, this was not performance testing, there was no config optimization or the like done for this test, we were more interested in understanding how the system handled long-term sustained loads.  We are working on performance benchmarking, so stay tuned for those if you are looking for numbers to compare to other solutions out there.

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Posted by Omar Sultan at 09:49AM PST

The Internet Protocol Journal

One of the hidden gems at Cisco is the Internet Protocol Journal.   The IPJ describes itself as “... intended to serve as an informational and educational resource for engineering professionals involved in the design, development, and operation of public and private internets and intranets. It does not promote any specific products or services, but focuses on issues facing the network designer or operator. The journal carries tutorial articles (“What is…?”) as well as implementation/operation articles (“How to…”). It provides readers with technology and standardization updates for all levels of the protocol stack and serves as a forum for discussion of all aspects of internetworking.”

The quality of the content is quite good and a subscription is free.  One of the reasons I bring this up for our readers is the the current edition has a the first part of a two part primer by T. Sridhar on cloud computing.  For those of you looking to come up to speed, it is a good vendor-agnostic intro to the topic.

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Posted by Omar Sultan at 01:19PM PST

Of Cloud Computing and Virtualization

There still continues to be an immense amount of confusion around what exactly constitutes cloud computing.  As an example, over the last few days, there has been a spirited debate whether the Sidekick service Microsoft/Danger offered was a cloud-based service or not (I am not going to dig into that here, but I do happen to agree with Chris Hoff’s viewpoint).

A common question I get is if virtualization is an inherent and mandatory component of any cloud solution.  I bounced this question up to our CTO’s office to get their take on things.  Their perspective:

Cloud computing delivers IT resources on-demand and elastically, and many organizations would like to leverage these capabilities today. Compute virtualization established itself as a way to improve resource utilization, but has other characteristics that make it more broadly relevant to cloud.

To expound on this a bit further, Glenn Dasmalchi, technical chief of staff in the office of the CTO at Cisco, provides a summary of how cloud computing and virtualization are related, and what advantages are afforded to customers.    He also touches on the network play with the cloud-virtualization linkage.

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Posted by Omar Sultan at 10:49AM PST

Are You Getting Top Performance for Your Oracle Applications over the WAN?

With Oracle Openworld running this week it’s a good time to think about the performance of applications over the wide area network (WAN).  With the changing business environment IT organizations are re-architecting how they deploy enterprise applications. Oracle applications automate business processes and increase productivity, but in this new network-centric world their performance is being impacted by longer WAN links and inefficient Internet protocols resulting in reduced performance and decreased user productivity.

Globalization and outsourcing has created a workforce that is spread across the world. At the same time, to reduce IT costs resulting from the spread of regional systems, and to take advantage of large scale virtualized systems, organizations are centralizing their application and IT infrastructure in the data center. The result of this trend is that the distance from the end user to the application server has increased dramatically and the connection is often over links with limited bandwidth.

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Posted by Michael Leonard at 02:05PM PST

Taking Cisco UCS for a Test Drive

Thinking about test drives reminded me that my 12 year-old son will be driving soon (yikes!) which then got me thinking about other rites of passage he will soon encounter such as the roller-coaster experience of asking a girl out on a date for the first time and looking for that nod from her.  Which then got me thinking—-hmmm, that should get him ready if he ever ends up doing product marketing (twisted, I know).

You see, sending your product off to review is a lot like asking someone out—you embark with full confidence, but you still anxiously await the nod and smile. That’s how we felt when we gave eWeek’s Cameron Sturdevant free reign to poke, prod, test, and badger our new Cisco Unified Computing System B-Series blade server.  After four days of kicking the tires and looking under the hood at every nook and cranny, Cameron had a smile on his face.  (Whew…not that we were all that nervous, you understand…)  But Cameron, in his own words, is “impervious to hyperventilating marketing hype.”  (Not that we’d ever indulge in such language.)

You can read Cameron’s full review here as well as check a couple of slide show he put together of the hardware and the UCS Manager.

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Posted by Omar Sultan at 08:35AM PST

Cisco UCS News: New Servers and Making Waves in the Magic Quadrant

Well, boys and girls, I have got a couple of cool things to report on the Cisco Unified Computing System front.  First, and foremost, I am happy to present the latest iteration of the UCS: the C-Series rack servers.  

	The Cisco UCS C250 M1 server is a two-socket 2 rack unit (RU) rack-mount server with patented Cisco Extended Memory Technology designed to increase performance and capacity for demanding virtualization and large-data-set workloads
	The Cisco UCS C210 M1 server is a general-purpose, two-socket, 2RU rack-mount server. Housing up to 16 internal disk drives for up to 8 TB of storage, the UCS C210 M1 is designed to balance performance, density, and efficiency for workloads requiring economical, high-capacity, reliable, internal storage
	The Cisco UCS C200 M1 server is a two-socket, 1RU rack-mount server designed to balance simplicity, performance, and density for production-level virtualization, web infrastructure, and other mainstream data center workloads

You can follow each of the product links for details, but here is a quick snapshot of the differences between the models.  The C200 and C210 will be available in November and the C250 well be here in time to tuck under the Christmas tree of that special server geek on your Christmas list.

On the UCS traction front, Gartner has released their Blade Server Magic Quadrant.  While licensing restrictions preclude me from showing you the quadrant, I can discuss the results. Gartner has placed us in the Visionaries quadrant, which we believe is great place for us to debut.  Essentially, “Visionary” translates to recognition of our completeness of vision and questions about our ability to execute.  Since we are newcomers to this market, that is a fair assessment as we have to prove ourselves against the incumbent vendors.  As we continue to deliver product innovation and increase customer momentum, we expect that to change over time. Gartner believes that Cisco UCS technology is as good if not better than anything offered by the competition and recognized we posses the factors needed to drive continues success in this space including our innovation in created the UCS as a differentiated, integrated system, the strength of our partnerships and our global reach and existing footprint in most data centers.

Finally, Gartner noted that they see an uptick in the number of conversations that they are having around UCS—that there is a high level of market interest.  I was have having coffee with my old boss yesterday (he is now back in the field) and he mirrored this sentiment—every one of his customers—and these are large enterprise accounts—is interested in the UCS, regardless of what they already have in place.

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Posted by Omar Sultan at 10:35AM PST

Are you ready for Oracle Openworld ? How to survive the jungle and save your feet

If you want to get the most out of your curriculum, and be ready for the next generation of data centers, here is a nice itinerary for the 4 days at Oracle Openworld
Monday 10/12/2009 

I will not miss Scott Rose presentation on Unified Computing Management - Check his invitation to attend the session

If you survive the intensity of this first day , here are some suggestions for the next three days

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Posted by Didier Rombaut at 12:52AM PST

Go Big or Go Home

I thought I would re-visit my cathedral-builders blog, since a couple of interesting stories popped up this week.

For starters, Nick Lippis posted a well thought out blog on his short list of cathedral-builders (Cisco, HP, and IBM).  Yes, I know I have a bias, but these three companies would be my top 3 as well.  I think all three companies have the correct blend of vision and completeness of footprint.  If I were to add a fourth, it would probably be either Oracle or Dell—both companies are certainly working hard on carving out a broader role.

Over at Gigaom.com, Gary Orenstein pondered if networking would become the final area of differentiation in the data center.  Certainly, I am not going to be upset if networking capability becomes the primary point of differentiation between Cisco, HP, and IBM , but, sadly, I don’t think it will be that simple.  I do, however, think he brings up an interesting dynamic for product vendors (the brick sellers in my original post).  If networking becomes a key point of differentiation, I don’t think the current arms-dealer approach of selling their wares to everyone and anyone will fly any longer.  If you are selling bricks with no compelling differentiation, then I think your business gets commoditized and the profit is driven out of it.  On the other hand, if you do have compelling differentiation, then I think you get get snapped up by one of the cathedral-builders to give them a point of differentiation in the broader data center battle that Gary talks about.

All, of which, perhaps helps explain the reports that surfaced this week that Brocade is shopping itself around.  This type of chatter usually makes customers nervous (often with good reason), but in the scheme of things, I can see why Brocade would want to take that risk and leverage its Fibre Channel expertise to find a home with one of the cathedral-builders in the market.

Anyway, I think it will be interesting to see what evolves over the next 12-18 months—how the cathedral builders flesh out their portfolio and what happens to the remaining brick sellers.

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Posted by Omar Sultan at 11:50AM PST

So What Exactly is a Nexus 4000?—The Answer

OK so first of all, I’d like to thank all the folks here who took time to post extremely useful comments on my previous blog “ So What Exactly is a Nexus 4000?”  . I’m glad to see that there is a lot of interest in this product. Also, glad to see that in terms of understanding and perception of the Nexus 4000 functionality, largely everyone got it right.

I’ve posted some details of Nexus 4000 along with some use cases below. I’ve also tried to respond to each of your comments individually towards the end of this blog. As we mentioned during the announcement, this is a general high level functionality introduction of Nexus 4000 Series. Our blade server partners will be making more details available as it relates to their blade chassis so stay tuned for more information. However, please do continue to post your comments & feedback around Nexus 4000 on this blog…

So what is a Nexus 4000?

The Cisco Nexus 4000 Series is a family of blade “switches” for scale-out x-86 blade servers ( non-Cisco). Nexus 4000 is NOT a Fabric Extender (aka FEX), Nexus 4000 is a “Switch”.

 Nexus 4000 Series Blade Switches are the fourth generation of blade switches from Cisco. It will fit inside blade server I/O slots to provide network connectivity for blade servers. The first generation blade switch was the Cisco IGESM blade switch. The second generation was the Cisco Catalyst Blade Switch 3000 family , the third generation is the Cisco Catalyst Blade Switch 3100 family  (aka VBS). And now the fourth generation is the Nexus 4000 Blade Switches.

So Cisco is not new to the blade switch market, in fact we are clear leader in blade switch market space both in terms of installed base of blade switches & market share even with our Catalyst blade switch product line.

This newest addition to the Cisco Nexus family of data center products, the Nexus 4000 Series will extend the benefits offered by the Nexus family to our partner blade servers. More specifically it provides the Unified Fabric  functionality to our partner blade servers.

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Posted by Kash Shaikh at 09:57AM PST

Cisco will be at Oracle Open World . Guess why? part II

Mark Fulgham, VP Cisco Data Center Solutions invites you to join us on Cisco booth (2301) to talk about running your Oracle applications on unified computing system . Cisco and Oracle have been for a long time partners, working together on specific architectures such as the retail architecture, taking advantage of application acceleration and network optimization. Today with the Cisco Unified Computing Systems, the deployment of Oracle application has never been so fast and so simple

For more information on Cisco and Oracle partnership

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Posted by Didier Rombaut at 12:48PM PST

So What Exactly is a Nexus 4000?

Now this is not a rhetorical question. I want answers, folks, answers! In the past we posed such questions but answered them in the same blog post. I’d like to try a different approach, I would like our blog readers to post their initial impression & understanding of Nexus 4000 first. So go ahead & post.

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Posted by Kash Shaikh at 08:57PM PST