So why not bring together two things that you’re already passionate about for the opportunity for fame, fortune and a great opportunity to interact with more Data Center professionals looking to improve their skills, knowledge and ultimately their businesses? If you’re interested and have some unique ideass, go check out the “Conquering the Cloud” Challenge from the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA). The ODCA is a consortium of the largest companies in the world focused on building better Data Centers, so you know the competition is going to generate some exciting ideas. Read More »
A few weeks ago, VMware announced a huge number of updates to their product portfolio, under the “Cloud Infrastructure Suite” umbrella. Without going into all the product/feature specifics, as plenty of blogs have already covered that, I wanted to highlight several areas where IT organizations will now have the opportunity to truly take advantage of joint integration and world-class technology from Cisco and VMware. I highlight these because many of them will be demo’d at the Cisco Booth (#700) at VMworld next week, as well as covered in white-boarding and Q&A sessions with our “Ask the Experts” panel each day.
So if you’re going out to VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas next week, I highly recommend you check out these technologies and opportunities to improve how IT is delivered to your business:
“Monster VMs” -- one of the key areas of vSphere 5 is enhanced capabilities to host large, Tier-1 application VMs. This is a huge advancement as IT organizations look to continue to drive greater utilization and efficiency in the data center, without sacrificing performance and availability. And there is no better x86 server platform to run those mission-critical applications on that Cisco UCS. Not only has the UCS plaform been independently proven to provide world-record performance for almost every application type, but more and more customers are voting with their wallets that UCS will be their next generation server platform (now up to 7400 customers as of August 2011). Read More »
Within the Data Center marketing organization, we spend quite a bit of time focused on activities that announce new products or solutions, as well as educating customers, partners and analysts. Sometimes this is done via launches and other times it’s at events like EMC World 2011, SAP Sapphire, Citrix Synergy, CiscoLive 2011 or the upcoming VMworld 2011 (Cisco is a Diamond-level Sponsor). But once that information leaves our hands and gets out into the community, it’s important for us to remember that it’s often discussed, dissected, and evaluated by a broad range of IT professionals.
Over the past few weeks and months, Cisco Data Center technologies have been features in several industry podcasts.
After just getting back from a great week at Cisco Live 2011, I wanted to highlight one of the demonstrations that garnered a huge amount of attention from attendees (customers & partners). This is from our CITEIS project, which is Cisco’s internal Private Cloud.
This demonstration highlights a number of unique Cisco Data Center technologies, along with partner technologies:
On July 12, 2011 Cisco announced at Cisco Live an expanded portfolio of UCS Networking products that improves Datacenter agility, scalability, performance with industry leading capabilities. The announcement includes the following new products:
1. A new Fabric Interconnect (Cisco UCS 6248UP) that doubles the switching capacity of the data center fabric to improve workload density (from 520Gbps to 1Tbps), reduces end-to-end latency by 40 percent to improve application performance and provides flexible unified ports to improve infrastructure agility and transition to a fully converged fabric
2. A new Chassis I/O Module (Cisco UCS 2208XP) that doubles the bandwidth to the chassis (from 40Gb to 80Gb) to improve application performance and handle workload bursts (from 80Gb to 320Gb to the blade)
3. A new Virtual Interface Card (Cisco UCS VIC 1280) that quadruples the bandwidth to the server to improve application performance (from dual 10Gb to dual 40Gb) and doubles the number of virtual interfaces to improve Virtual Machine workload density (from 128 interfaces to 256 interfaces). It also offers a choice of Hypervisor to customers by expanding VM-FEX technology to Linux based hypervisors (KVM based on RHEL 6.1). Read More »
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