The storage architecture you envision is closer than it appears

Guest Author: Mario Blandini of SwiftStack

The disruption that cloud has triggered in the marketplace has many organizations looking for a deeper level of expertise and experience from their solution vendors. Cisco has long been known as the top experts in networking, and has grown in reputation as makers of the most robust x86 servers available. Lesser known however are the software solutions available for purchase from Cisco, and the role that Cisco UCS S-series Storage Servers play in a modern storage cloud.

This new approach with a software defined storage architecture may not be top of mind for IT architects and Network Infrastructure experts, but it should be. Storage to many is still imagined as a refrigerator-sized box in a rack with a large door, when a superior architecture for modern applications is actually comprised of a cluster of standard nodes as building blocks. Cisco UCS S3260 is an ideal building block for modern storage clusters, and Cisco has several validated designs with different software offerings to provide customers with freedom of choice.

Object Storage is a software solution that is ideal for the networking throughput and storage density designed into the Cisco UCS S3260 Storage Server. As of August 11th, I am happy to share updates to our object storage solution with SwiftStack, a San Francisco based software partner on our global price list for the past year. These are the result of collaboration directly with end users who are looking to Cisco as the top-level experts for data center solutions across networking, compute, and storage.

Cisco Validated Design

We have published a full-blown Cisco Validated Design for deploying SwiftStack software on Cisco UCS S3260. If you are not familiar with a CVD, think of it as a blueprint that simplifies the build process and delivers an expected positive outcome. Simply put, we do all the heavy lifting for you to mitigate risk, decrease complexity and speed up deployment times getting you operational faster. For more information the Cisco and SwiftStack partnership, follow this link to a newly released solution brief.

New solution bundle part numbers

In addition to SwiftStack as the only object storage solution on the Cisco GPL, there are new solution bundle part numbers to make ordering even easier. Whether purchasing direct from Cisco or from any of our reseller partners worldwide, selecting the right solution for any data-centric environment has been streamlined to accelerate your deployment, consumption, and time to value.

End to End support with Cisco Solution Support

Managing solutions can be a challenge, especially when working with multiple vendors and products in a single environment. Customers can select centralized support from Cisco solution experts for a single point of accountability for issue management and resolution.

Cisco Solution Support has proven to provide a 43% average decrease in time to resolve solution-level issues using Cisco Solution Support versus product support alone. Click for more information on Cisco Solution Support

Cisco customers with data-centric applications can proceed with confidence, benefiting from a validated solution with easy ordering and Cisco Solution Support to deploy and scale storage infrastructure on-premises and in the public cloud. But why Cisco UCS over other server choices?

Here’s why:

4x 40Gbps of I/O throughput with various network connectivity options. For TBs growing to PBs of unstructured data, this is a big differentiator for pumping large amounts of data across the network, and it provides investment protection as a cluster scales.
The choice between 1 or 2 server nodes per chassis, allowing for smaller initial deployments particularly at remote sites without trading off availability.
Cisco Integrated Management Controller (CIMC) allows pooling of drives and dynamic allocation of these drives to server nodes. In tandem with policy-based data placement built-in to SwiftStack,

If you are interested in learning more about SwiftStack running on Cisco UCS you can go to the Cisco Marketplace or SwiftStack’s Cisco UCS website for quite a bit of information.