Solution Brief IT Agility Delivered: Cisco Unified Computing System © 2011–2012 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public information.
IT Agility Delivered: Cisco Unified Computing System Information technology organizations are in the midst of a major transition. As they move from being cost centers to integrated, strategic parts of the business, IT administrators, managers, and executives are keenly aware of the challenges they face.
IT Agility Delivered: First Unified System Available Anywhere Cisco UCS is a massively scalable, distributed, unified system with a single point of connectivity and management First Unified System Available Anywhere Radically Simplified Architecture The system implements a radically simplified architecture that eliminates the multiple redundant devices that populate traditional blade server chassis and result in layers of complexity: Ethernet switches, Fibre Channel switches, and chassis management modul
IT Agility Delivered: First Unified System Available Anywhere Consolidate 168 Management Points to Two with Cisco UCS When NetApp needed to deploy a scalable testing cloud capable of hosting 23,000 virtual machines, the company’s engineering support services chose Cisco Unified Computing System. The first step consolidated 714 existing servers onto 120 blade servers in a single Cisco UCS platform, reducing 168 management points to just two: the pair of Cisco UCS 6100 Series Fabric Interconnects.
IT Agility Delivered: Intelligent Infrastructure Cisco UCS is intelligent infrastructure in which every aspect of server configuration can be programmed and thus automated Intelligent Infrastructure Means Rapid Deployment “… we can very quickly reconfigure any server blade so that it’s ready for production in 15–20 minutes. Rapid configuration is critical in our environment, where a server outage is simply unacceptable.” Ken Brande Vice President, IT NightHawk Radiology Services (http://www.cisco.
IT Agility Delivered: Integrated, Model-Based Management Model-Based Management Automates IT Cisco UCS B250 M2 Extended Memory Blade Servers can be integrated in nearly half the time it takes to add HP c-Class blade servers with HP Virtual Connect, with 67 percent fewer steps, taking advantage of the largely automated process.
IT Agility Delivered: Integrated, Model-Based Management service profile is associated with a physical server, its entire configuration is provisioned automatically, from firmware revisions to network and I/O connectivity. Service profiles can be created for specific serial numbers, essentially preconfiguring them before they arrive on the loading dock: install the rack-mount server or insert the blade server into a blade-chassis slot, and the system discovers it and configures it automatically.
IT Agility Delivered: Unified Fabric The system’s unified fabric unites data and management planes and network and storage traffic Cut Switching Infrastructure in Half with FCoE Chinese University of Hong Kong transformed its IT infrastructure with a unified fabric implemented with the Cisco Unified Computing System and Cisco Nexus® switches.
IT Agility Delivered: Unified Fabric Unified Fabric Yields Massive Infrastructure Reduction Traditional rack and blade server environments use separate infrastructure for IP, storage, and management networks, resulting in a massive number of cables, I/O interfaces, and upstream switch ports to support the servers. Total number of network cables in this example: 138.
IT Agility Delivered: Cisco Fabric Extender Technology Scale at Half the Cost and Complexity Server costs are significant, but so is the cost of the infrastructure to support each server. Cisco FEX Technology dramatically reduces the number of interfaces, cables, and switches needed to support Cisco UCS blade servers. The result is that the average per-server infrastructure cost is US$2343 for Cisco UCS compared to US$3761 for an HP system.
IT Agility Delivered: Cisco Fabric Extender Architecture • Cisco fabric extenders directly connect fabric interconnect ports to blade and rack servers. These low-cost, low-power-consuming devices pass all management and data traffic to the fabric interconnects for consistent, centralized management.
IT Agility Delivered IT Agility Delivered Servers using the x86 architecture have essentially become the standard for every application, from enterprise infrastructure to mission-critical applications. While traditional vendors have been focusing on delivering incremental improvements in efficiency, Cisco has been developing technologies that transform the way that IT organizations do business, making them truly more effective as integral parts of the companies they support.
