This week , I met Johnny Tung, Systems Marketing Manager for Data Center Solutions, to talk about a very interesting announcement : The Virtualized Multiservice Data Center
” Johnny , can you tell us what Happened to Cisco’s Unified Data Center on Dec 3th?
Well…it just got more interesting! You may have heard of Virtualized Multiservice Data Center. Let me remind you. It is Cisco’s reference architecture for the Unified Data Center. The big news here is that we have just released the 3.0 design. We are introducing Cisco FabricPath into the Unified Data Center network in order to simplify and scale Cloud Ready Infrastructure designs for Private and Virtual Private Cloud deployments.
FabricPath simplifies and expands existing data center network design by removing the complexities of Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), and thus enabling more extensive, flexible, and scalable Layer 2 designs. This release marks the introduction of FabricPath-based designs into VMDC; further FabricPath-related VMDC releases will follow as Cisco develops and evolves its FabricPath offerings.
From halfway around the globe in fabulous Singapore, I was delighted to have the chance to interview Wong IK Ming, a Cisco Certified Partner covering Southeast Asian nations, to get his perspectives on data center security opportunities.
Tell me about your customers. What are their most pressing problems?
eSURIA caters mostly for the public sector but we are now extending our services to include Oil and Energy. Our customers have to adhere to new and emerging government mandates around data privacy and sovereignty. This requires a combination of strong governance processes mapped to sound technical controls and a design that is future proof, for example ensuring unified policy, dynamic and logical segmentation. Security must be thought out from the beginning—from the application to the edge of the cloud. I’ve seen a couple of instances of community clouds where security has not been thought through and it’s a matter of time before a security incident occurs.
As a partner, what benefits do you see for Cisco’s approach to data center security?
Our customers are fast adopting new infrastructure models and having the Cisco Validated Designs is a huge benefit because it enables us to attest to the technical soundness of the overall solution and to present security as an integrated element as opposed to a separate element. It also enables us to build these into the overall services templates that we provide with confidence that the necessary testing has taken place. I look forward to seeing more of these validated designs. For example, a validated security blueprint for Microsoft private cloud applications with Cisco UCS.
This new Cisco Validated Designs for Cloud blog series will feature the latest CVDs released and published in this rapidly-evolving systems and technology area…. Before digging into some of these new CVD’s, I had a short conversation with Tom Nallen who leads the Cisco Validated Design program and Design Zone, the main repository for these on Cisco.com.
” I’ve heard about CVDs, what exactly are they?
Simply put, Cisco Validated Designs are recommended, lab-validated, end-to-end designs for next-generation IT systems. The foundation of this long-running systems validation program at Cisco is the Cisco Validated Design guide, or CVD, which provides lab-validated technical guidance to help achieve faster, more consistent and reliable technology deployments. While the customer requirements-driven CVD development process requires a substantial investment of system capital and engineering expertise by Cisco, CVDs are published on Cisco.com and available to all free of charge.
CVD’s are developed by many different business units across Cisco, focused on the five Cisco Priorities including: the Network Foundation (routing, switching, services plus security and mobility), Collaboration, Data Center/Virtualization and Cloud, and Video – all within a Technology Architecture linked to Business Architecture. Cisco Validated Designs play a key role here by incorporating a wide range of technologies, products and applications into a portfolio of proven solutions that have been developed to address the business needs of our customers. The complete portfolio of Cisco Validated Designs can be found on Design Zone on Cisco.com at www.cisco.com/go/designzone.
OK, so how are CVDs relevant to Data Centers and Cloud?
I am happy to share that Cisco is a key sponsor for the Microsoft Tech Ed North America 2011 event in Atlanta next week. At TechEd, we will be showcasing our data center business advantage solutions and showing how you can maximize your investments in leading Microsoft applications such as Exchange, SharePoint, and SQL Server.
With Cisco UCS, we are not just making servers, we are making server history.
It is well known that Cisco UCS adoption has been fantastic with over 5400 customers, with a large number of customers efficiently and fearlessly running their mission critical Microsoft applications on UCS. These customer deployments are backed by series of CVDs (Cisco Validated Designs) that serve as key enablers to successful deployments.
This past week, Thomas Scheibe (Director, Data Center Architecture) had the opportunity to co-present with VMware and NetApp at TechFieldDay on a broad range of Data Center topics.
Thomas is one of the leaders in our Solutions and Strategy Unit (SASU) that is responsible for creating Cisco Validated Designs (CVD). One of the topics discussed was the recent CVD on Enhanced Secure Multi-Tenancy and Thomas asked, “How many of you are familiar with the depth of technical content in a CVD?”
I’m somewhat disappointed to say that the show of hands was less than unanimous. Now this shouldn’t have come as a complete surprise to us, because in the past CVDs were primarily targeted at Network Administrators and the TechFieldDay audience is traditionally more focused on Servers, Storage and Applications. But considering that many of our Data Center solutions are no longer just focused on networking elements, we look at this as an opportunity to create awareness for the Architect and Administrator communities. We also look at it as an opportunity to solicit your input and feedback on how we can better deliver content that will help you design and deploy Data Center solutions that are becoming more complicated as convergence, virtualization, and automation blur the lines between IT organizations. Read More »
This week , I met Johnny Tung, Systems Marketing Manager for Data Center Solutions, to talk about a very interesting announcement : The Virtualized Multiservice Data Center
