Most data centers are challenged with the same cost control problems of power, cooling, space, and people. Illustrating that one x86 server can cost more than US$400 a year in just energy consumption, a 2009 Gartner study concluded that IT managers can combat rising costs by reviewing their data center strategies and proactively looking to consolidation, use of energy saving solutions, and strategic deployment of IT labor.  Our online chronicle, Cisco Data Center 2011-Texas, provides an inside look at how Cisco IT is tackling these challenges with a strategy that is reflected in our new facility, Texas Data Center 2.

Read More »

Tags: cloud, Consolidation, cooling, data center, power, virtualization

With the collaboration launch this week, Cisco’s call control infrastructure is now the single platform for both voice and video, creating a simpler approach to integrated solutions and an increase in the overall business value derived from these technologies.

Taking a step back, Cisco is effectively doing the same with video as we did with voice several years ago, and continuing to pave the way for enterprise-wide business communications.

The Cisco Unified Communications Manager brings together video and voice endpoints from Cisco, including endpoints from the Tandberg acquisition.

Alongside this integration, Cisco is introducing two telepresence endpoints at a lower, more affordable price, with smaller footprints, higher quality WebEx video conferencing, and a new service creation platform for service providers that extends telepresence to their organizations and customers.

Video is huge, and we are seeing continued focus and advancement in this space.

Also among the collaboration launch, Cisco emphasizes IT transformation with desktop virtualization, which is  a larger-scale investment for IT. Cisco’s new Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI) solution, for the first time, enables the integration of desktop virtualization and the rich collaboration features of video. The solution includes  two new desktop virtualization clients and support for Cisco’s Cius on a mobile VXI client.

Exciting times, my friends!

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, desktop virtualization, launch, summit, TelePresence, virtualization

Visions of the future vary drastically in popular culture, the scenes shift and circumstances can be an almost infinite number of possibilities, but what is one constant? At some point, the main character will inevitably interact with a thin-client device during a pivotal moment. It usually takes the form of a handheld screen with access to a limitless amount of media and data from seemingly anywhere.

Storage and compute power is good, and getting better—but I find it hard to believe the entire library of congress, and the tools to manipulate that data could fit on a tablet the size of my placemat. What does that leave? Virtualization and high-speed wireless access. You don’t need to store or process anything on the client, or even go beyond rendering images on the screen. Everything can be stored, provisioned and sent direct to you. The future is beginning to look a little more plausible.

This week, Cisco announced the Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI), enabling rich media communication to virtual desktops. Applications and services can be quickly deployed across your entire workforce, and the many devices increasingly entering our lives. Fundamental to VXI is the secure, reliable delivery of media across the network. Much of it is latency sensitive, such as live video or audio—but regardless of the content, it needs to be delivered on-demand flawlessly.

Read More »

Tags: 802.11n, virtualization, vxi, wi-fi, wireless

Cisco announced a new system of technologies today designed to help enterprises introduce desktop virtualization to their organizations. Mark Boslet’s story for News@Cisco provides a good primer on the phenomenon if you need it, but in a  nutshell, virtual desktops shift computing applications and business information off PCs and into a data center. Users than access those applications and information through a secure Internet connection (via a private or public Cloud), in much the same way as we browse the Internet today.

Desktop virtualization isn’t a new phenomenon (if you’ve been in the workforce for a couple of decades, you might remember the green screen and mainframe varietal!) but it’s becoming more and more compelling as good broadband connectivity becomes pervasive and customers tap server virtualization technologies and wide area network acceleration to make applications perform better over WANs.

Read More »

Tags: citrix, data center, virtual desktop, virtualization, VMware, wyse

As the solutions marketing manager for Cisco’s Desktop Virtualization solutions, I want to use this opportunity to start a dialog around the trends we’re seeing across various IT organizations, and their efforts to embrace desktop virtualization. I thought we might start with posing a common question: As you’re designing your data center infrastructure to handle virtual desktop workloads, Is desktop virtualization really just another workload?   Do you build a single consolidated, shared infrastructure to accommodate the usual server workloads alongside VM-hosted desktops, or do you handle these somehow differently?  A VM’s a VM, regardless of what’s sitting on it, right?  Consolidated… shared… elastic…  this is the cloud infrastructure vision isn’t it?  Whether you’re embracing VDI or App Virtualization, why should desktops be different?  Maybe we should start with probably the biggest challenge and exposure associated with moving to virtual desktops: The End User

Quality of user experience and application responsiveness as impacted by a sub-optimal infrastructure still tend to be among the biggest impediments for virtual desktop implementations moving from proof-of-concept to production (that and the sometimes elusive path to expected ROI/TCO, which we’ll get into in another post).  These are often the result of insufficient testing to replicate end-state loads on network, computing and storage.  The results of a small pilot quite often  don’t accurately predict what really happens when you multiply “The End User” by ten-fold.

So often with these projects, somewhere along the way, the combination of disappointing user experience, maybe compounded by unrealistic expectations results in the solution never getting off the ground.  I’d like to say that there’s one solution that never fails. But let’s be honest – there are so many variables when you consider the infrastructure (compute, network, storage) as well as use cases across the constituents in your workforce, that there’s likely no single prescriptive approach to ensuring success Day 1.

This much we can agree on: your chances for success significantly improve when you commit to the right Day 1 infrastructure approach, tailored to delivering the best user experience possible, vs. hoping your current infrastructure is agile and elastic enough to accommodate the 300 users who don’t know what they’re about to step into Monday morning when they log-on to their new virtual desktop.

Here are a few questions to consider when trying to “build-it-right” on Day 1 :

1. What would happen if you were to mix desktop workloads directly with enterprise application workloads? Isn’t the approach to updating, patching and securing desktops very different from the approach taken with business critical applications in the data center? It’s not hard to imagine A/V scans on desktop workloads impacting the performance of applications workloads residing among the same compute resource pool.
2. What’s the profile of the compute and storage infrastructure? It’s well known that desktop virtualization can place a significant burden on memory and I/O before it does on CPU, except in the case of graphics-intensive apps. Therefore it makes sense from both an economics and “user-experience” perspective to ensure that the memory / CPU / I/O ratio is well suited to hosting virtual desktops. Likewise with storage -- virtual desktop IOPS can be extremely high, especially during boot and logon storms… this can account for larger than necessary storage costs… so doesn’t it make sense to ensure that the compute and storage infrastructure are designed and configured around the unique requirements of desktop workloads?
3. What about security?  The advent of virtual desktops gives IT a unique opportunity to dynamically create virtual workgroups that have access rights to certain resources and not others.  This could possibly be achieved even when mixing desktops and application workloads, but how much more difficult would that be to manage and maintain, especially at the outset of moving your virtual desktops into full production?

Let me know what you think …  and look out for some exciting news from Cisco on desktop virtualization by registering for our Collaboration Experience Launch on November 16^th.  In my next post we’ll provide more color to the argument here… and would love to include your thoughts.

For more information:
Cisco Desktop Virtualization Solutions
Cisco Virtualization Experience Infrastructure

Tags: citrix, desktop, thin client, vdi, virtualization, VMware, vxi