31 July 2010
Saturday
Cisco UCS: Convergence of server, storage and security in the data center
By Khoo Boo Leong | Mar 24, 2009
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PrintThe server and the network have become an integrated whole. Bridging the silos in the data center using industry-standard technologies, Cisco's Unified Computing System unites compute, network, storage access and virtualization resources in a single energy-efficient system.
These UCS technologies will solve data center challenges “by offering a single holistic solution with integrated management and the critical support necessary for scaling virtualization," said Vernon Turner, senior vice-president of Enterprise Infrastructure, Consumer and Telecom Research at IDC.
"By increasing the performance and scale of virtualized environments while at the same time improving the ability to control and manage virtual workloads, this solution has the potential to deliver the full benefits of virtualization across the data center to increase productivity and agility, and reduce IT costs," Turner added.
“Virtualization has changed the rules of how data centers should operate and be managed,” said Andre Smit, the managing director of data center sales for Asia Pacific at Cisco. “This is the result of three years of effort in simplifying the data center infrastructure, drawing on a team of compute, networking, storage, security and application experts from Dell, Egenera, HP, Oracle, Sun, Veritas, VMWare, Xensource and others.”
“[One major challenge] was to break down the walls between existing silos and create a clean-sheet approach to a brand-new system,” said Smit. “A member of the team is VMware's founder and former CTO Ed Bugnion, who joined Cisco [via Nuova, a Cisco-funded startup] to help define this new system.”
The idea of a unified system which melds both server and networking expertise also implies that enterprises and IT VARs and SIs have to reassess the way the server and network teams operate.
“Over the years, server teams have been able to do what they do without needing much interaction with the networking team,” said Pete Nicholls, the data center business development manager for Asia Pacific at Cisco. “Now, with virtualization, you’ll have instances of, for example, deploying a VMWare hypervisor that comes with an embedded switch.”
