On April 15th Cisco will be opening a second data center in Allen, Texas. This is not just any data center ladies and gents, this state-of-the-art data center demonstrates Cisco’s architectural vision and strategy by incorporation their latest innovations; Unified Computing System (UCS), Nexus switch portfolios, and the latest green technologies.
What degree of green are we talking about? LED lighting – naturally, solar power -- absolutely, water-efficient landscaping – by all means, use of recycled building materials – affirmative. But to take it up a notch, Cisco used LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) when building the data center. LEED is an internationally recognized green building certification system that provides third-party verification that a building was designed and built using strategies intended to improve performance metrics such as energy saving, water efficiency, CO2 emissions reductions, etc.
You can listen to a live broadcast on April 15that 3:30pm, ET with CIO Rebecca Jacoby and VP of IT John Manville. They will discuss in more detail about how it was built to be “ultra green” and how this data center fits into Cisco’s overall data center and cloud strategy: www.ustream.tv/ciscotv.
It is exciting to see what was first a vision of a data center strategy, that developed into products to grow with that strategy. Makes me ponder what will the 3rddata center be comprised of? Walk that walk Cisco (with a carbon-free footprint of course).
I don’t know about you , but I want to be well prepared for the March 30th Cisco announcement
Listening to Cisco SVP Bill Brownell’s invitation, we can definitely expect some very interesting product news, but more importantly a new round of conversations about the right fabric-infrastructure, especially in the context of cloud computing.
That’s why we will have special guests such as John McCool, Soni Jiandani and Tim Gillis in addition of Forrester Research and IDC (see my previous blog)
So as I was willing to be well prepared, I found this interesting blog from Ivan about data center fabric architecture , which obviously grabbed also the attention of some of our smart engineers
Sometimes, progress necessitates that we look at things in an entirely new light. To paraphrase Star Trek—if you want to do something groundbreaking, sometimes you have to go boldly where no one has gone before.
Against that backdrop, I wanted to dispel a recent rumor in the marketplace that Cisco has gone (warp drives engaged, presumably) to a place called “Planet Zircon” to sell its industry-first and industry-leading Unified Computing System (UCS).
Leaving aside for a moment that some of our competitors seem to be living in an alternate universe, UCS is actually selling quite well right here on planet Earth. Our architecture for the virtualized data center, whereby via UCS we unify servers, storage access, networks, and virtualization technologies to drive the value of data center infrastructure to an entirely new level, has gained acceptance from a great number of earthly companies.
But since we’re having fun with science fiction metaphors, let’s suppose you were a time traveler who went back to sneak a peek as Cisco first began developing UCS. You might be forgiven for thinking that Cisco had taken leave of its senses. But leaving planet Earth? No, our feet were firmly planted here.
Our Technical Marketing Engineers (TMEs) have delivered a library of technical videos, accompanied with voiceover explanations in clear, simple English, to show you how the Unified Computing System really works. Taken as a whole, this library provides a great functional tour of UCS, but it’s broken down into very digestible, well-defined topics so that you can zero in on topics and features of particular interest.
“Fabric computing is a fixture on the radar screen of many IT groups, driven by the increased penetration of virtualization and prospects for cloud computing.As virtualization penetration increases, IT organizations will deploy virtual machine (VM) mobility, which will demand more attention to a fabric-based infrastructure that better integrates server, storage and networking for greater agility and faster time to deploy.” Based on this observation, Gartner George J Reiss and Andrew Butler organized recently a survey to evaluate which vendors are the most credible and ready to address the challenges of virtualization and cloud computing.
Cisco pioneered the vision of Ethernet-based “Unified Fabric” for the data center and has been shipping products to support that vision for over three years. Subsequently it introduced Unified Computing and Unified Network Services, all of which have formed the building blocks for Cisco’s Data Center Fabric. Competitors have validated Cisco’s vision by scrambling to deliver their own versions of the Fabric.
On March 30th starting at 9:00 am PST, Cisco executives and experts , partners and customers will supplement this Fabric vision and showcase its evolution, while bringing multiple proof points to bear. And in a pure Cisco spirit, to enrich a very open conversation, we invited the Senior Analyst Andre Kindnesss from Forrester Research who wrote recently about “The Dark Horse In The Datacenter Fabric Race?” and the Program VP Data Center Network Services Cindy Borovick from IDC to share their vision.
If you want to be among (or amongst) the first to know what’s cooking at Cisco, this is your chance ! This event will be live and we hope to hear from you.
