Cisco Unleashes Virtualisation Potential With Unified Computing

Cisco has unveiled new data centre architecture, innovative services and an open ecosystem of best-in-class partners to help customers develop next-generation data centres that unleash the full potential of virtualisation.

With this announcement, Cisco is delivering on the promise of virtualisation through Unified Computing – an architecture that bridges the silos in the data centre into one unified architecture using industry-standard technologies. The key to Cisco’s approach is the Cisco Unified Computing System, which unites compute, network, storage access, and virtualisation resources in a single, energy-efficient system that can reduce IT infrastructure costs and complexity, help extend capital assets and improve business agility well into the future.

To help customers accelerate the transition to the Unified Computing architecture, Cisco is paving the way with a comprehensive suite of new Unified Computing services. In addition, Cisco has announced collaboration with industry leaders on the Unified Computing System and architecture.

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The Cisco Unified Computing System

Based on industry standards, the Unified Computing System is a new computing model that uses integrated management and combines a ‘wire once’ unified fabric with an industry-standard computing platform to optimise virtualisation, reduce data centre total overall cost, and provide dynamic resource provisioning for increased business agility.

The Unified Computing System unites compute, network, storage access, and virtualisation into a scalable, modular architecture that is managed as a single system.

o Compute - Cisco has designed a new class of computing system, which incorporates the new Cisco UCS B-Series blades based on the future Intel Nehalem processor families (the next generation Intel Xeon processor). The Cisco blades offer extended memory technology to support applications with large data sets and allow significantly more virtual machines per server.

o Network - The Cisco Unified Computing System provides support for a unified fabric over a low-latency, lossless, 10 Gigabit-per-second Ethernet foundation. This network foundation consolidates what today are three separate networks: local area networks (LANs), storage area networks (SANs) and high performance computing networks.

o Virtualisation - The Cisco Unified Computing System unleashes the maximum potential of virtualisation, by enhancing the scalability, performance and operational control of virtual environments. Cisco security, policy enforcement, and diagnostics features are now extended into dynamic virtualised environments to better support changing business and IT requirements.

o Storage Access - The Cisco Unified Computing System provides consolidated access to both storage area networks (SANs) and to network attached storage (NAS). Support for a unified fabric means that the Unified Computing System 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 Virtual Machine has become the new atomic building block of the data centre, creating new challenges and opportunities with the potential to transform the computing environment and deliver significant benefits,” said Mario Mazzola, senior vice president, Server Access and Virtualisation Business Unit, Cisco. “Taking advantage of this architectural shift in the data centre, we developed a new computing model that transforms the data centre into a dynamic IT environment with the power to increase productivity, improve business agility and drive the benefits of virtualisation to a new level.”