Cloud computing. Virtualization. Green IT. These concepts promise to transform the way IT services are delivered, reduce operational costs and environmental impacts, and streamline data center management. However, these concepts still require basic data center resources — server, storage and network — that are inherently complex and difficult to manage.
Through its Data Center 3.0 strategy, Cisco is re-architecting the data center core in order to provide better support for virtualization and help data centers transition to 10 Gigabit architectures, unified fabric solutions, cloud computing and green operations. Key to Cisco’s approach is the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), which unites compute, network, storage access, and virtualization resources in a single energy-efficient system that can reduce IT infrastructure cost and complexity, help extend capital assets, and improve business agility well into the future.
The Cisco UCS combines a “wire once” unified fabric with an industry-standard computing platform in a scalable, modular architecture that is managed as a single system. This “clean slate” architectural approach increases scalability without adding complexity and provides interoperability and investment protection. IT managers can achieve more energy efficient data centers with the Cisco UCS because it uses one-half the components, and requires less cabling and power/cooling than legacy server installations.
Scalability, Performance, Control
The Cisco UCS unleashes the full potential of virtualization by enhancing the scalability, performance and operational control of virtual environments. Cisco security, policy enforcement and diagnostics features are extended into dynamic virtualized environments to better support changing business and IT requirements.
With support for a unified fabric over a low-latency, lossless, 10Gbps Ethernet foundation, the Cisco UCS consolidates what today are three separate networks: LANs, SANs and high-performance computing networks. This lowers costs by reducing the number of network adapters, switches and cables and decreasing power and cooling requirements.
The Cisco UCS also provides consolidated access to both SANs and network attached storage. Support for a unified fabric means that the Cisco UCS can access storage over Ethernet, Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet or iSCSI, providing customers with choices and investment protection. In addition, IT staff can pre-assign storage access policies for system connectivity to storage resources, simplifying storage connectivity and management and helping to increase IT productivity.
The next-generation two- and four-socket server additions to the Cisco UCS portfolio offer up to 50 percent more processor cores, 300 percent greater application performance, and four times the standard memory footprint, providing the ideal platform for the majority of enterprise workloads. With these innovations, the Cisco UCS delivers up to four times the compute and bandwidth capacity in the same footprint, up to 92 percent fewer points of management than legacy networks, up to 30 percent greater application throughput, and up to 10 percent reduced power consumption compared with like-for-like competitive configurations.
Management Built In
Management is integrated into all the components of the system, enabling the entire solution to be managed as a single entity through the Cisco UCS Manager. The Cisco UCS Manager provides an intuitive graphical user interface, a command line interface and a robust application programming interface to manage all system configuration and operations.
The Cisco UCS Manager helps increase IT staff productivity, enabling managers of storage, networking, compute and applications to collaborate on defining service profiles. Service profiles help to automate provisioning and increase business agility, allowing data center managers to provision applications in minutes instead of days.
Many IT managers have been reluctant to use hardware-centric power control solutions because they lack visibility into applications running on the hardware and could inadvertently slow down critical applications. Using UCS Manager, IT staff can align power consumption with workload requirements, dynamically assigning capacity with push-button simplicity. IT managers can now confidently implement power management policies to create greener data centers, without fear of negatively impacting business applications.
Organizations cannot reap the full benefits of virtualization, cloud computing and green IT by simply layering those concepts onto an IT infrastructure that is difficult to manage and scale. By uniting compute, storage and network resources in a single, high-performance system, Cisco is helping organizations overcome challenges at the data center core and paving the way for next-generation solutions.