Cisco Launch the Unified Computing System
Apr 11th, 2009 by admin
An excellent blog post from Colin McNamara outlines the Cisco Unified Computing System. What is it ? Some tech’ specs below:
- Single point of management for all devices in the fabric.
- Virtual machine enabled networks adapters. (VNtag capable)
- Up to 320 B-series compute blades in one fabric.
- Up to 384 Gigabytes of memory per blade (full width blade)
- Server Profiles - virtualize server identities (UUID, WWN, MAC)
- Hardware Assisted Virtualization using Intel’s next generation Xeon (code named Nehalem-EP) processors
- Redundant 10 Gigabit connections between servers.
- Fibre Channel SAN access available to every blade.
- Capital costs up to 20% less
- Operational costs up to 30% less
This is an amazing piece of kit and I really recommend you check out the complete blog post for a thorough overview.
There are some really nice features once you start digging into the kt. There is a large memory footprint per-blade using industry standard DIMMs. The model drive management system manages all kinds of “server profile” types of attributes including MAC addresses, WWN, but also VLAN segments, number of NICs, and more. The use of 10G Data Center Ethernet and the FCoE capability greatly reduces ports and wiring complexities. The innovtive use a tagging traffic at the Ethernet layer correspond to VM’s (hypervisor) and extend the switch ASICs, the NICs ASICs, and the Hypervisors themselves utilize this which makes the machine particularly interesting for VM centric deployments.
The design was allegedly driven by the virtualization software team within Cisco, and it shows !
