Today, at the High Performance Computing for Wall Street event, we announced Cisco Algorithm Boost or Algo Boost technology, a groundbreaking networking innovation with numerous patents pending, that offers the highest speed, visibility and monitoring capabilities in the networking industry. A true game changer delivering competitive advantage to our customers!
Ideal for high performance trading, big data and high performance computing environments, this new technology offers network access performance as low as 190 nanoseconds, more than 60% faster than other full featured Ethernet switches. When your business success is determined by nanoseconds, this is a huge gain!
The first switch to integrate the Cisco Algo Boost technology is the new Cisco Nexus 3548 full-featured switch which extends Cisco’s leadership in networking by pairing performance and low latency with innovations in visibility, automation, and time synchronization. And it is tightly integrated with the rich feature set of our Nexus Operating System, a proven operating system used in many of the world’s leading data centers, creating a truly differentiated offering.
Outside of that large, black, monolithic machine in the middle of the datacenter referred to as the mainframe, there aren’t that many servers that require as many network and storage connections as the backup server. It’s not really sexy, it’s not computing Pi, generally doesn’t run a hypervisor and is bought with one goal in mind, move data. Not just some data, but a lot. These machines often move all of the data in your datacenter off of disk and onto tape, either real or virtual. In many datacenters, these backup servers are sometimes the only non-x86 platforms left due to their ability to contain high numbers of HBAs for SAN connectivity and NICs for network connectivity. They’re like the tractors of the datacenter. Read More »
Do you have different management tools for your Storage and Ethernet Networks? For IT Administrators who need to manage them, using these various management applications can be a daunting task. Cisco announced last week the release of Prime Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) 6.1. DCNM is now part of the Prime portfolio of Infrastructure Management products that focuses on holistic, single pane of glass management of Cisco’s Unified Fabric.
Cisco Prime DCNM 6.1 provides a robust framework and comprehensive feature set that meets the routing, switching, and storage administration needs of present and future virtualized data centers. DCNM offers visibility into the virtualized hosts by integrating with industry standard hypervisors and provides host-tracking capability to easily manage and diagnose virtual and physical servers.
March 2009 was an exciting time for both for Cisco and for me personally. Cisco launched the revolutionary Unified Computing System, with many observers across the industry doubting if we’d stay the course (and if we’re honest, some truly misplaced derision -- I wonder who is on Planet Zircon now!). And I joined the Cisco Data Center Services team from the Cisco R&D organization! So with the recent third generation launch of Cisco UCS, described very well by my colleague Todd Brannon, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on our data center services portfolio around that time, and where we are now. My previous blogs chronicle part of this journey, however I have to say, the direct comparison I draw here I personally think shows that we have indeed brought a new transformational experience to the data center for our customers. And I’d like to give you my personal recollections on how and what I found out about Cisco’s approach to shaking the incumbents’ lack of innovation in the blade server market.
I have talked to many enterprises that want a private cloud; also service providers that want to build a public cloud based upon Cisco UCS / Nexus. They all would like to get to their first generation of cloud very quickly. We have many conversations on infrastructure to use, the right choice of hypervisor, and what use cases to start with. Today I talked to a customer of our Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud that wants a differentiating end user portal. Everyone can spin up a VM, but how to do it in a way that will drive adoption and new business, whether it is for the enterprise or service provider? How do we do this at a cost and a timeline that meets the needs of the business and the CIO.
These are not lightweight concerns. I have seen many data center automation projects that focused too much on the provisioning and not enough on the end user experience. The Intelligent Automation Solutions Business Unit at Cisco has been involved with many customers building private and public clouds with our software stack. This includes Cisco IT’s very large private cloud deployment based upon our software. The two services they deployed: CITEIS (Cisco IT Elastic Infrastructure Services) Express and CITEIS VDC (Virtual Data Center) has received broad acclaim. Watch the following videos by Jamie MacQuarrie of the Intelligent Automation team on these two CITEIS Services.
Cisco Prime DCNM 6.1 provides a robust framework and comprehensive feature set that meets the routing, switching, and storage administration needs of present and future virtualized data centers. DCNM offers visibility into the virtualized hosts by integrating with industry standard hypervisors and provides host-tracking capability to easily manage and diagnose virtual and physical servers.
