Among all the IT domains, perhaps the most action is in the data center, and by extension, in the cloud. Virtualization has taken root, and delivered a lot of operational efficiency. It has provided some interesting challenges as well. Virtual Machine (VM) mobility is one. Tracking workloads as they move between servers, within and across data centers is more fun than most people imagined. So, how does one take this dynamic environment, and leverage it to fulfill requirements such as:
Delivering anything as a service – handling heterogeneous workloads for any application
Dealing with VM mobility – optimizing resource allocation across any location
Offering dynamic response – responding to real-time requirements at any scale
How does one solve these emerging challenges to achieve the next levels of productivity and efficiency?
For quite some time, Cisco has believed in the promise of “going beyond silos” (Yeah, that’s the campaign we launched as well, for those of you who saw the recent ads). But awareness campaigns apart, the concept is pretty simple – how do we take some of the traditional silos in the data center like the network, compute, storage and application services and bring them together – holistically – to deliver better efficiency, resource utilization, simplicity and cost benefits.
Fundamentally, this is the promise of Cisco’s data center fabric approach – it delivers on the vision of a high-performance, shared infrastructure, that brings together the network, compute, storage access elements, and L4-7 application services into a tightly integrated resource. It is open, integrated, flexible, scalable, resilient and secure. And it is built off a vision that Cisco has been executing for 3+ years now on the foundation of Unified Fabric, Unified Network Services and Unified Computing. This foundation will form the bedrock for customers looking to move towards cloud-based models exploring application independence, location freedom and massive scale.
So, we have some winners for our Crazy Cabling Contest. I’d like to thank everyone who took the time to submit an entry and took the time to vote. It was a hard-fought battle, but here are the victors: Read More »
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
Thanks to everyone who submitted photos for the Cisco Crazy Cabling Contest. We’ve received some great photos so far! The jumble of wires data center managers have to deal with every day highlights the headaches folks have to deal with when trying to maintain and manage their data centers!
Now you can help select the winners from the top 5 finalists. Go to www.facebook.com/ciscodc and look at the top photos along the “wall” of our data center Facebook page. To vote, please make sure you are first a fan of the Cisco’s Facebook data center page; you can do that by clicking “Like” at the top of the Facebook page.
From there you should be able to click on the photo of your favorite and then click on the “Like” button.
Voting will end on Sunday, March 27 at midnight 12:00 a.m. Pacific Standard Time.
The 3 photos with the most votes will be announced on Monday, March 28 on both Cisco’s data center Facebook page and on Cisco’s Data Center Networks blog.
The first place winner will receive a brand new Flip Mino HD 120 camera and an Amazon gift card worth $200.00 USD. Second and third place winners will also receive a Flip Mino and Amazon gift cards worth $100.00 and $50.00 USD.
“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.
