cisco ucs benefits of data center networks
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5 Ways CISCO UCS Transforms Enterprise Networking

It’s been a decade since Cisco announced “Project California” in March of 2009, launched the following year as the Unified Computing System (UCS) platform. This bold entry into the enterprise server market was met – at first – with a combination of skepticism and bewilderment.

But within five years of its launch, Cisco had overtaken HP as the top blade server vendor. In 2014, Forrester praised the product line as a “successful disruption and a new status quo”. So how did a total newcomer blow all its competition out of the water and rise to the ranks of industry standard?

The Quest for Server Automation

When it comes to the space for server blades, HP had the leg up for some time – in 2005, it acquired the patent for commercial blade architecture from its purchase of RLX Systems. In 2009 – the same year that Cisco announced Project California – it released the BladeSystem Matrix, its attempt to create true data center automation.

With the aid of VMware, HP’s Matrix allowed administrators to configure server blades through software-defined templates which could be duplicated and used to configure new ones quickly.

This early effort to manage and provision servers through code is an example of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), defined well by InfoWorld contributor Paul Venezia in a commentary published that year:

“The ideal of divorcing services from hardware and pushing server management away from the physical layer…”

After testing Matrix, Venezia concluded it had some ways to go, and in another article concluded:

“The setup and initial configuration of the Matrix product is not for the faint of heart. You must know your way around all the products quite well and be able to provide an adequate framework for the Matrix layer to function”

A server technology that really lived up to the ambitions of automation seemed to be some ways down the road – until, that is, the launch of UCS.

What is Unified Computing?

While Matrix had retained traditional hardware with a virtualized software layer, Cisco defined a new approach to server architecture specifically designed to support abstraction by merging network, storage and memory traffic in “fabrics”.

The approach – often referred to as “converged” or “fabric” computing – took automation the rest of the way to a truly agile, centrally managed and scalable server infrastructure. Early comparisons with Matrix revealed a massive reduction in the complexity which Venezia commented on – deploying a 2-blade system with UCS took 28 fewer steps.

benefits of cisco ucs

Today, Cisco’s UCS platform remains the standard for enterprise fabric computing. Here are five ways that UCS adoption transforms a standard data center:

  1. Single Pane of Glass

In some industries, “single pane of glass” management is still a buzzword. For UCS, it’s a reality: with the UCS Manager, organizations can

  • Manage and configure up to one thousand UCS (and now HyperFlex) products from a single pane
  • View and altar server configurations from CPU to memory across the enterprise
  • Centrally monitor memory, power supply and temperature errors in real-time
  • View all server incidents and alerts from a single location

For server administrators, centralized control provides reduced time to service (TTS), significantly fewer redundant processes, and a better top-down view of a data center’s daily operations.

  1. Programmability

The ability to manage servers through code is likely the most recognizable feature of the UCS ecosystem. Besides enabling fast deployment of new server configurations, IaC provides numerous advantages:

  • Eliminates configuration drift, facilitating easier, standardized development and continuous delivery
  • Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) through automation
  • Through the UCS Platform Emulator, companies can develop applications for various systems without investing in physical hardware

When it comes to hardware virtualization, the sky is the limit in terms of development and deployment. While Cisco is not the first to offer virtualization, it is by far the best commercial networking platform developed specifically for that purpose.

  1. Ease of Migration

Migrating, configuring and deploying new servers is a time-consuming process; in traditional data centers, removing and re-configuring old servers can interfere with or even halt operations.

UCS elegantly resolves these issues by allowing an administrator to:

  • Transfer a service profile from one domain to another all from the management UI
  • Rapidly migrate data between servers in less than an hour
  • Pre-configure and test power, network and storage settings with minimal impact on the end user

With server pooling, grouped machines can even be configured with the push of a button, eliminating much of the grunt work involved with setting up new workflows and configurations.

  1. Fast Recovery for Hardware Failure

As a corollary of easy configuration and deployment, UCS allows server profiles to be easily swapped in the case of a hardware failure. Moreover, the Cisco blade chassis provides a nearly plug-and-play experience for replacing broken equipment.

With server pooling and automation rules, UCS can even re-deploy a failed server profile without user intervention, saving a data center on resources and precious downtime.

Conclusion

The sheer number of expanded capabilities provided by UCS are a testament to the innovation behind its core features. Simply put, fabric architecture offers server admins the ability to utilize any hardware resources any way they want.

While the future may hold even further convergence in networking infrastructure, for now we think UCS fulfills the ideal Venezia articulated ten years ago: if it can be imagined and programmed – with UCS – it can be done.

Professional Cisco Support in Northern Virginia

Located near the booming data center corridor in Loudon County, VA, Digital Tech Inc provides rapid response maintenance services including EOSL extension, spare parts, short- and long-term maintenance agreements, migration assistance and depot repair options. Our skilled engineers offer multi-vendor support, covering IBM, HP, Dell EMC, Cisco, NetApp, and many more.

To learn more, contact us today.

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Cisco Unified Computing System Changes how IT Organizations do Business

The Cisco Unified Computing System is the first integrated data center platform that combines industry-standard, x86-architecture servers with networking and storage access into a single unified system. The system is intelligent infrastructure that uses integrated, model-based management to simplify and accelerate deployment of applications and services running in bare-metal, virtualized, and cloud-computing environments. Employing Cisco’s innovative SingleConnect technology, the system’s unified I/O infrastructure uses a unified fabric to support both network and storage I/O. The Cisco fabric extender architecture extends the fabric directly to servers and virtual machines for increased performance, security, and manageability.

Cisco UCS helps change the way that IT organizations do business, with benefits including the following:

  • Increased IT staff productivity and business agility through just-intime provisioning and equal support for both virtualized and bare-metal environments
  • Reduced TCO at the platform, site, and organization levels through infrastructure consolidation
  • A unified, integrated system that is managed, serviced, and tested as a whole
  • A comprehensive management ecosystem that supports complete infrastructure provisioning and management that can make your Cisco UCS instance anything from a bare-metal enterprise application engine to a multlicloud containerized environment. Locally hosted tools give you a range of options and Cisco Intersight software as a service is emerging as the solution to help you manage all of your assets worldwide.
  • Scalability through the ability to manage up to 10,000 servers with Cisco UCS Central Software and to scale I/O bandwidth to match demand, with a low infrastructure cost per server.
  • Open industry standards supported by a partner ecosystem of industry leaders
  • A system that scales to meet future data center needs for computing power, memory footprint, and I/O bandwidth; it has hosted five generations of servers and three generations of network fabric in its highly simplified blade server chassis—and is poised to continue to support future generations of servers and networks.

When we first entered the server market in 2009, the challenge was to prove to our customers that we could out-innovate our competitors, and that we were committed to the market for the long term. Today, we are still the only vendor to offer a unified system that eliminates the tedious, manual, error prone assembly of components into systems, providing instead a system that is self-aware and self-integrating and that brings true automation to IT operations.

Our commitment to the marketplace has been demonstrated by a rise to join the top tier of server manufacturers in just three years, with more than 56,000 customers and more than 150 world-record performance benchmarks. We have continued to innovate and demonstrate our commitment to customers and to the server market. With three generations of fabric technology supporting modular upgrades to the system’s connectivity, and with even more generations of Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC processors incorporated into our products, we are demonstrating our strong support for customer investments and our readiness to take our customers into the future.

Download the full UCS Solution Overview from Cisco.

Located near the booming data center corridor in Loudon County, VA, Digital Tech Inc provides rapid response maintenance services including EOSL extension, spare parts, short- and long-term maintenance agreements, migration assistance and depot repair options. Our skilled engineers offer multi-vendor support, covering IBM, HP, Dell EMC, Cisco, NetApp, and many more.

To learn more, contact us today.

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How Cisco’s Servers (Cisco UCS) Lowers Costs and Raises Agility in The Data Center

“Agility” has become the marching order of today’s digital transformation initiatives across industries ranging from IT to services to fast food restaurants. A vector of “scalability” and “adaptability,” the term simply means: “the ability to respond quickly to changes or threats.”

An agile data center is therefore one which can scale or downsize quickly with growth, respond well to variable workloads and get back on its feet quickly after a network outage or system failure. This comprises a few distinct goals:

  • Meeting service level agreements (SLAs) by maintaining performance standards
  • Reducing the amount of labor and steps required to service, replace or scale systems
  • Reducing the impact of failure on operations using automation and straightforward response strategies

If this scheme smacks of getting your cake and eating it too, that’s because efficiency and higher performance rarely go together with a reduction in labor or complexity. DCAs often walk a thin line between cost and performance, falling back on redundant infrastructure and a large staff to keep things working smoothly.

Why Data Centers Aren’t Agile

The average data center has too many moving parts to be predictable. Equipment failure happens all the time, whether due to mechanical issues or human error. When it occurs, deployment is often cumbersome, resulting in a lengthy time-to-service (TTS).

To make matters worse, most data centers are perilously complex, involving an indefinite number of blades, racks, switches and routers without a central administration platform. This “siloing” of equipment and systems means that upscaling or downsizing is no easy task for administrators.

Agility means – among other things – efficiency and simplicity. When an organization, strategy or workflow devolves into a rubik’s cube of interconnected parts, one small change has unintended consequences, creating resistance to change in general.

Fortunately, it is possible to achieve even the highest ambitions of agility in the data center using a non-traditional approach to IT: unified computing.

The Unified Computing Servers

Cisco’s unified computing system (UCS) is a converged IT architecture for enterprise environments which abstracts hardware from functionality, allowing administrators to define and automate processes with minimal labor.

Using fabric interconnects (FI), UCS takes a “single pane of glass” approach to server management, enabling administrators to manage equipment through the creation of policies, pools, and profiles for blades and rackmount servers. Not only does this centralized approach eliminate a significant amount of grunt work, it also solves the issue of siloing in fell swoop.

Here are some of the ways that UCS creates a more agile data center:

  1. Policy Based Management allows administrators to configure 100 servers as easily as configuring one. UCS allows for the creation of service profile templates which are automatically configured as soon as a device is plugged in. This approach is as close to “plug and play” as a data center has ever come, leading a significant reduction in labor.
  2. By eliminating the need to manually boot and configure servers, UCS reduces TTS by a significant margin. In comparison with competitors, blades can be fully integrated into UCS fiber interconnects 47-77% faster than in traditional server environments.
  3. By simplifying the number of switching layers, devices and equipment connected to a network, UCS also allows for fast scaling and easy downsizing. Adding and removing devices is painless, requiring no manual adjustments.
  4. UCS improves utilization of equipment through the use of server pools that dynamically repurpose to accept certain kinds of traffic or tasks depending on workload. This reduces the amount of equipment a data center must deploy, leading to lower costs.

While the term “agile” has been overused in recent years, UCS is one of the few technologies which really lives up to that promise in a field where agility has never been more elusive or important. And with Cisco’s recent updates to its UCS server line configured to support edge computing and AI/ML workflows, support isn’t going anywhere soon.

If you’re looking to bring digital transformation and agile processes to your data center, UCS isn’t a bad place to start the search.

Professional Cisco Support in Northern Virginia

Located near the booming data center corridor in Loudon County, VA, Digital Tech Inc provides rapid response maintenance services including EOSL extension, spare parts, short- and long-term maintenance agreements, migration assistance and depot repair options. Our skilled engineers offer multi-vendor support, covering IBM, HP, Dell EMC, Cisco, NetApp, and many more.

To learn more, contact us today.

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The UCS Solution

The Challenge

The digital business transformation is upon us, and it is creating new demands on IT organizations:

  • Applications: Modern applications are becoming less monolithic and more like organic entities that grow and shrink through the use of modular, distributed microservices. This reduces dependence on traditional IT infrastructure and places new demands on IT organizations in terms of the large number of endpoints to manage and flexible infrastructure needed to support them. With agile development and DevOps deployment approaches becoming the norm, developers and administrators demand the capability to program their own infrastructure. This is necessary in order to quickly roll out new applications and updates to existing ones.
  • Management: The main issue for IT organizations is managing infrastructure at scale and being able to match resources to application requirements—yet manage all of the different types of infrastructure in a simple, holistic fashion. Furthermore, the IT organization’s clients—line-of-business managers, application developers, and DevOps teams—are asserting increasing influence over the adoption, purchase, and deployment of technology. IT organizations saddled with ponderous management tools are hard pressed to compete with the fluidity of self-service, multicloud environments that their clients can purchase on their own if the IT organization doesn’t keep pace.
  • Location: Once upon a time traditional IT organizations could support and manage their clients and applications safely within the glass walls of an on-premises data center. Now they must support clients, applications, and workloads in public, managed, edge, and private cloud environments— all while maintaining compliance with best practices, business and governmental regulations, and data sovereignty requirements.

As a modern IT organization, the challenge is to meet the needs of the digital business transformation while still supporting the traditional, monolithic applications that are the foundation of your business. You have to simultaneously embrace the traditional deployment model and the fluid nature of today’s multicloud deployments.

The Solution

The straightforward solution to today’s data center challenges is Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS®). It’s not a collection of servers. It’s a fully self-aware, self-integrating system. Because it is 100 percent programmable, it has been the solution to computing challenges for more than 63,000 customers since 2009. The system is flexible, agile, and adaptable, and the portfolio of products supported by Cisco UCS includes blade, rack, multinode, and storage-intensive servers; converged infrastructure; hyperconverged infrastructure (Cisco HyperFlex™ systems); and solutions for the network edge such as Cisco UCS Mini and Cisco HyperFlex Edge.

There is a fundamental difference between vendors that sell servers and Cisco Unified Computing System. Servers arose as more powerful personal computers, taking many of their attributes, including time consuming, manual, error-prone configuration of I/O, network, and storage subsystems. Traditional servers are monolithic, complex to deploy, and even more complex to adapt to new workload demands. In contrast, Cisco UCS is a single unified system, with six fundamental attributes that make it revolutionary.

Fabric Centric

We blend all of the system’s I/O traffic into a single shared active-active network that carries all modes of communication from servers to the outside world. Our low-latency, high-bandwidth network fabric is a shared resource so networking can be allocated to interfaces based on policies rather than physical interface configuration and hard-wired cabling. The result is that you can provision and balance resources to meet your workload needs easily.

Endpoint Aware

Cisco UCS was developed in the virtualization era, where the norm was multiple independent workloads running on the same server. Today the number of workloads has become practically unimaginable as containerized environments place hundreds of workloads in a single virtual machine. Whether you run virtualized, containerized, or bare-metal workloads, all I/O is virtualized. This gives you the capability to support a massive number of endpoints but with a level of control equivalent to each endpoint having its own dedicated (but virtual) cable to the outside world. This gives you the scale of virtualized, with the workload isolation and security of the physical world.

100 Percent Programmable

From the very beginning, Cisco UCS was designed with the entire state of each server—identity, configuration, and connectivity—abstracted into software. This makes our system 100 percent programmable, easy to adapt to the varying requirements of both modern workloads and traditional monolithic business applications. With a completely programmable system, you can give your clients the level of control they need to manage their workloads. For global organizations, Cisco Intersight™ software-as-a-service management gives you complete role- and policy-based control over all of your resources regardless of where they reside. Fine-grained infrastructure management can be handled in Agile development and DevOps shops with scripting languages that provide access to the Cisco UCS unified API.

Intent Based

Cisco Intersight software helps you to more precisely align your infrastructure with the needs of your business. It enables administrators to automate configurations or tasks based on specific requirements that are tied to business objectives and application performance. Rather than having to be concerned with every detail of system configuration, intent-based management enables you to describe what you want to accomplish, with the cloud-based automation we provide translating your intent into action.

Delivers Business Benefits

Our policy-based approach to management gives you the simplicity, automation, and capabilities you need to increase productivity and support a fast-paced business environment.

  • Improved staff productivity: By aligning your infrastructure with applications and the way teams work together, you can create synergies that can’t be achieved with other architectures.
  • Better use of IT staff: The common, simplified management of servers, storage, and fabric establishes best practices and eliminates the need to understand the nuances of specific components. You can use your subject matter experts to develop policies and use lower-level administrators or operations personnel to implement policies.
  • Effective communication: Cisco UCS management improves communication between roles through cross-visibility and role-based administrative access.
  • Faster time to value: You can rapidly roll out new applications and business services at cloud-like speed and enhance the competitive strength of your enterprise.
  • Increased operational efficiency: You can automate many routine tasks, improve resource utilization, and proactively prevent manual errors that typically keep your IT staff from working on high-value tasks.
  • Improved flexibility and agility: The capability to automatically integrate additional resource capacity into larger, flexible pools helps ensure that your IT staff can achieve economies of scale and efficiency without greater complexity.

Analytics Powered

What if your infrastructure integrated directly with your support organization? The recommendation engine built into Cisco Intersight software integrates with the Cisco® Technical Assistance Center (TAC) to help you easily detect problems and initiate support requests. As the Cisco Intersight recommendation engine gains intelligence, our vision is for it to provide suggestions and recommendations for you to optimize your configurations to gain the most from your investment.

Download the full UCS Solution Overview from Cisco.

Located near the booming data center corridor in Loudon County, VA, Digital Tech Inc provides rapid response maintenance services including EOSL extension, spare parts, short- and long-term maintenance agreements, migration assistance and depot repair options. Our skilled engineers offer multi-vendor support, covering IBM, HP, Dell EMC, Cisco, NetApp, and many more.

To learn more, contact us today.

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Cisco Intersight – The Benefits of Essentials

A primary design goal of Cisco Intersight is to simplify and automate IT operations. Cisco Intersight – Essentials delivers on this objective with significant new advantages to Cisco UCS and HyperFlex customers.

Guest Blogger: Gautham Ravi, Director, UCS Product Management

Pervasive Simplicity

One of the challenges of management at scale is keeping things simple. When we first began developing the requirements for Cisco Intersight, our customers told us we needed to address the tedious tasks associated with maintaining systems. We had to simplify and automate many activities. I described this fundamental requirement as the customer demand for pervasive simplicity in a previous blog. Cisco Intersight – Essentials is designed to address many of these issues, such as updating firmware and making deployments more efficient.

We wanted to explain how we have designed Intersight to make management of Cisco UCS and HyperFlex easier, so we developed this video to summarize some of the benefits.

Automating Updates

The process of updating and maintaining firmware at the right levels can be very time consuming. This is particularly true for customers with systems in multiple locations. However, it is critical to apply updates in a timely and consistent manner to ensure security and compliance.

Cisco Intersight – Essentials addresses this issue by providing automated firmware updates for Cisco UCS C-Series servers. You can set policies to automatically update your rack-mount servers wherever they are located. We also support functions like UCS C-Series policy-based configuration with Service Profiles and virtual KVM to make remote provisioning and management easier. Here’s a link to an Intersight Communities page, if you’d like more technical details.

We’ve also created this demo video to explain how the automated firmware update feature works.

Streamlining Deployments

Many of our HyperFlex and Cisco UCS customers support systems in remote locations. They wanted it to be easier to roll out new systems and transition to hyperconverged infrastructure. We recently added a new HyperFlex Installer that dramatically simplifies deployments. This blog provides you with more details.

Cisco Intersight is cloud-based management as-a-service, so we will constantly be rolling out new functionality and making it immediately available to our customers. We are just getting started.

Try It for Free

You can take advantage of the benefits of this new platform today at no cost by trying the free 90 day trial of Cisco Intersight – Essentials. Just go to the Intersight portal at intersight.com and logon using your Cisco ID. There’s also a getting started video to help you.

 

For additional information:

  • #CLEUR: If you’re attending Cisco Live Barcelona this week, learn more about the Cisco Intersight by stopping by the demo booth in the Data Center zone.
  • If you can’t join us at Cisco Live, please go to www.cisco.com/go/intersight

 

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