And, then a funny thing happened…I learned that, while customers value standards compliance, what they value even more are networks that work and do what they need them to do.  And herein lies the inherent contradiction of networking standards and the constant tension between innovation and standards.

Ultimately customers look to us to address their problems: “I need my network to _________ (fill in the blank) so I can support the needs of my business—oh, and I’d like that ASAP, please” .  Luckily, our customer base is not shy, so when we see a trend, we move to address it and put solutions out there for our customers.  This is where innovation is critical—having the ability to continually move the ball forward to ensure networking continues to meet the needs of markets that are themselves continually evolving.  

But, ultimately, standardization is the end goal.  Without standardization, innovation cannot scale.  Time and again, we have seen that if a technology is balkanized, it stalls because no one wants to choose poorly (on a somewhat related note, I have a fine collection of HD-DVDs I’m willing to part with at a fair price).

Most of you are probably familiar with some version of the technology adoption lifecycle chart below, made popular by Geoffrey Moore in his seminal work “Crossing the Chasm”.

Since there is no such thing as a Green Data Center today (in a purist sense), this book addresses what steps you can take and what standards are their to move towards one.  This is a great book to not just read once but refer back to in building your plan.

An essential component of any cloud installation is its network.   When servers are deployed in a cloud, they need an external network to be usable.  The network services that they need are more than simple IP connectivity, and each customer of the cloud will need some customization.  Here are some key types of cloud network service.

We also invite two customers, a CIO and a CTO to share their analysis of the Vblock Infrastructure Packages approach  

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): 

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

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.

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.

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.