It’s been a long time coming, it’s true. It was long the #1 request I have gotten when it comes to Cisco’s deployment for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE): when is UCS going to have “FCoE Northbound?”

Now, at long last, I can confirm that the answer is right now.

I saw the announcement over the weekend, and before I had a chance to even sneeze out a tweet of my own, I was beat to the punch by a few other intrepid UCS fiends. The reaction was one of unadulterated joy and pure, rapturous bliss.

Or something close to that.

In all seriousness, from a storage perspective the one thing that has driven people crazy is the fact that the UCS Fabric Interconnects (FIs) could not continue with convergence upstream. It’s been the #1 question I’ve gotten as a storage Product Manager, and while I’ve long said that FCoE is not the panacea for the Data Center, I believe this goes a long way in making converged network even more realistic in today’s environments. Read More »

Tags: Multihop FCoE, Nexus 5000, Nexus 7000, UCS

For those of you wondering about the impact to Cisco of Software Defined Networking and the combined SDN strategy of VMware and Nicira, I point you to a very rational and well-articulated article by Mike Fratto of Network Computing, that basically says Cisco doesn’t have much to worry about. (Enterprise Strategy Group had already said something similar, by the way).

Specifically, Fratto says:

The lack of programmability in existing networking hardware is certainly a problem, but VMware’s acquisition of Nicira does not mean that Cisco and its ilk will be marginalized… It does mean the role and management of the physical network is changing, and I think Cisco is further ahead than most of its competitors in creating a vision for the next phase of networking.

I couldn’t agree more. Since Cisco live! when we announced our Cisco ONE strategy for network programmability as well as the advances in our Nexus 1000V portfolio for virtual network overlays, I have been posting on many of the same points.

My take here was that the VMware-Nicira acquisition did not portend a strategic break with Cisco, and while there are some obvious overlaps in our product lines, there are still a number of areas of collaboration, cooperation and interoperability. The virtual network infrastructure is just one piece of a larger software stack and the differentiation will likely be decided in the orchestration, management and applications built on top of the newly programmable infrastructures sometime down the road. Read More »

Tags: Cisco ONE, Cisco Open Network Environment, FabricPath, LISP, Nexus 1000v, Nexus 5000, Nexus 7000, Nicira, OpenStack, OTV, SDN, software defined networking, virtual network overlays, VMware, vPath, VXLAN

Over recent years the Alberta Motor Association (AMA) has continued to grow with the Alberta economy.  What was once purely a motor association is now a 2,200 employee organization which runs a large Insurance Company, Bank, Travel operation and RoadSide Assistance operation.  As our business continues to grow, change and evolve we have looked for technology solutions to help us deliver enhanced member tools and better experiences.

We strive to provide the best member experiences in every interaction.  With almost 1 million active members across Alberta, we use technology to bridge the gap and provide services over this large geographic location.

We have standardized on the Cisco Nexus platform for our network operations across 18 centres, which includes wireless and switching technologies in many of our buildings. Perhaps most importantly, the Nexus platform is helping our IT team think beyond the racks – focusing on how we can better serve our members and employees instead of just ‘keeping on the lights.’

Read More »

Tags: Alberta Motor Association, customer voice, Nexus 5000, techology solutions

I was sitting in a room with a client the other day and normally in these conference rooms with the mahogany tables and high back leather chairs*, you have Cisco on one side of the table, and the client on the other. However, this wasn’t the case, as the table was formica and the chairs were folding.  Also, in the room was two groups that had never spoken before except in rare cases, “The network is down!” or “Our hosts can’t see their storage!”  Yes my friends, it was the LAN and SAN folks in the room.  The topic of FCoE was in front of us and the question was around their soon to be deployed Nexus 5000 switching infrastructure.    The discussion between the two parties over who would manage the Nexus 5000 reminded me of a scene from Ghostbusters… Read More »

Tags: data center, FCoE, Fibre Channel, MDS, Nexus 5000, SAN, storage area network

Captain’s log, October 27, 2011:

The USS Cisco took off for the Gestalt IT Networking Tech Field Day 2 with Captain Omar Sultan (see picture below, courtesy of techfieldday.com), Data Center Solutions Sr. Marketing Manager, at the helm. Tech Field Day networking industry experts gathered on the bridge, cleverly disguised as the Cisco Cloud Innovation Center (CICC) Lab, for an informal, no-holds-barred conversation on recent Nexus portfolio announcements, the continued march towards automated provisioning of cloud services and ever-evolving VM networking technologies.

Captain Omar at Cisco Networking Tech Field Day 2

For those who weren’t at the event or haven’t seen the video recording yet, please excuse my unabashed geekiness, but you’ll have to watch the first minute of the video to get the above reference. As a new member of the Data Center Solutions Marketing team, this is also my first foray into the Cisco blog-o-sphere, so I hope to share some fresh viewpoints on the day’s events.

Several things were made very apparent during the Tech Field Day session:

Read More »

Tags: automated provisioning, brighttalk, CIAC, cicc, Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud, cloud, han yang, networking tech field day, Nexus 1000v, Nexus 3000, Nexus 5000, Nexus 7000, omar sultan, orchestration, tech field day, Tina Feng, virtual machine networking, virtual services, virtualization insights, vm networking, VXLAN