The ASR 9000 product family has recently come out with a new feature called nV Edge (nV = Network Virtualization). This feature unifies the data center edge control, data and management planes. So, I’ll note a couple things here on this feature and then tell you why I think it has potential to be truly awesome.
My good friend Rabiul Hasan just wrote a proof of concept document just posted to Design Zone that provides the configuration and setup details. I encourage you to go check it out here.
Today, Cisco Live “World of Solutions ” (the show floor) opens at 4:30 pm PDT in San Diego Convention Center. One of the marquis demos has been shown at EMC World with a lot of interest.
This blog is the second part of a two part blog dedicated to this Mobility and Business Continuance demo, created by Cisco, EMC and VCE. In part 1 (read blog here) I invited EMC Colin Durocher (@OtherColin) to share with us his perspective on the demo. As promised, I come back today with more details on the demo, including a video interview conducted by Cisco Daniel Bogda (@dabogda) with EMC Craig Chapman (@VirtualChappy) and VCE Tom Chatham (@tchatham). I asked also Tom, who already wrote here, to bring his perspective on the demo.
Tom Chatham is a Principal vArchitect with VCE Corporate Engineering responsible for delivering VCE solutions, customer solution testing, technical marketing events and evangelizing private cloud. 16 years of experience in the industry, most of that time spent focused on storage, virtualization and unified computing. Including extensive network infrastructure, systems architecture and business continuity.
“VCE is excited to kick things off this week at CiscoLive! Between our big booth, speaking sessions, and demos we’ve got a ton to talk about (www.vce.com/events/cisco-live).
Like we did at EMC World, for this year’s CiscoLive! show VCE wanted to kick it up a notch with LIVE demonstrations of all the cool technologies we have at our fingertips.
Daniel Bogda, Craig Chapman, Tom Chatham
We have a number of VblockTM Systems going to Cisco Live! (and VMworld in August) so it made perfect sense to show off our Workload Mobility Solution. Besides, isn’t cloud all about the ability to offer services from anywhere?
We have three Vblock 300 systems located in the VCE, EMC and Cisco booths. An additional network aggregation rack has been added to each Vblock system to house Nexus 7010 switches, EMC RecoverPoint appliances and EMC VPLEX engines. Panduit provided 1000 feet of fiber trunk cable containing 6 pair of fiber, which has been hung from the ceiling between booths.
The Nexus 7010 switches are providing our core network services, making each booth it’s own data center. RecoverPoint and VMware Site Recovery Manager are handling traditional long haul disaster recovery. VPLEX Metro is providing Active-Active storage clustering capabilities. This is the ability to stretch a VMware vSphere cluster between two sites today, and up to four in the future. VPLEX Metro provides storage array block level LUN consistency and data availability while OTV on the Nexus 7000 series switches provide layer 2 network services.
Diagram: VCE Vblock WLM plan for CiscoLive!
Let’s take a step back for a moment and look at what makes this “cool”. Traditionally, migrating data and applications in or between data centers involves manual steps and data copies, where IT would either make physical backups or use data replication services to handle getting the data from side A to side B.
The most recent “Megatest” was initiated by Light Reading to assess our CloudVerse architecture. In the second part of the test, Cloud Intelligent Networks, Light Reading sought to validate the performance of Cisco’s IP NGN infrastructure in a world of cloud computing, and so far it’s the industry’s only end-to-end test of public cloud infrastructure.
Key questions which Light Reading sought to answer included:
Can Cisco deliver on the scale of network needed to connect customers to the cloud?
How can traffic between clouds (data centers) be delivered most efficiently to optimize network resources?
How can Data Centers keep up with the amount of traffic between them forecasted in the future, without having to replace long distance fiber infrastructure?
To learn more about how to administer and deploy IPv6-Based Cloud Intelligent Networks, and even have an opportunity to get your own questions answered, please attend a webinar with Sanjeev Mervana, Senior Director with Cisco, Jim Hodges, Senior Analyst with Light Reading, and Carsten Rossenhoevel, the Managing Director of the European Advanced Networking Testing Center.
The webinar will be held on April 4th, 2012 at 11am New York / 4 pm London and you can register at this link here. We look forward to hearing your questions!
In years past we’ve delivered on what we call “Megatests” -- comprehensive evaluations that validate our performance claims. The most recent “Megatest” was initiated by Light Reading to assess Cisco’s CloudVerse architecture, and represents the industry’s first and only end-to-end test of public cloud infrastructure. The first of four reports focused on the Unified Data Center, including Unified Compute (Cisco UCS), Unified Fabric (Nexus family), and Unified Management.
