Cisco Enhancements Ready For Large-Scale UCS Deployments
Cisco Enhancements Ready For Large-Scale UCS Deployments by UCStrategies Staff
This week, Cisco has been busy extensively updating its Unified Computing System (UCS) and cloud automation portfolios. The changes it has made reach out to its centralized management tool which enables large-scale UCS offerings and broadening of connectivity tools which, as well as blade server versions, support rack-mount server versions of UCS.
UCS Central is a new addition to the UCS platform, and acts as a “big brother,” according to the director of UCS product management, Brian Schwarz. A single management dashboard is provided by UCS Central; this allows large-scale deployments by UCS and UCS Managers which is required in order to operate and monitor the distributed server environments over many large enterprises.
Depending on a customer's configuration, an instance of UCS Manager may cover 160 to 320 computing nodes, and UCS Central is able to monitor up to 10,000 physical servers. The same data model and API structure as UCS Manager are the basis of UCS Central, and therefore IT managers used to the UCS Manager interface will not find anything too suprising.
Centralized inventory, server consoles, logs and other management tools are also available along with the computing-node scale. According to Schwarz, those developers currently using Cisco's UCS API (which includes companies like Compuware, Splunk and ScienceLogic) can make more capabilities for management in the UCS Central Platform.
When Cisco released UCS in March 2009, it grew 50 percent year-over-year and produced $1.6 billion business within four years. UCS also proved to be one of the company's most successful product portfolios and appealed to larger and more sophisticated customers which make up around 25-30 percent of the total customer base.
Along with UCS Central, UCS Manager has also been updated. It was confirmed last week that Version 2.1 will simplify the Cisco C-series rack-mount servers' connectivity via rapid application deployment which was in the past only accessible through Cisco's blade server UCS configurations. UCS Manager 2.1 comes with less cables for connecting to virtual servers and dampens the number of switches and adapters needed.
Vice president of virtualization and cloud for Presidio, Steve Kaplan, said that Cisco's enhancements would provide solutions for UCS' challenges with customers for whom the C-series rack servers come as a more appropriate data center.
He said: “As virtualization proliferates, we are seeing an increased demand for huge amounts of memory, multiple adapters, specialized adapters and high disk-spindle counts in local storage, These needs are better served by rack mount form factors, but rack mount servers have traditionally required a lot more infrastructure and cost than blades.”
A new version 3.1 of Cisco's Intelligent Automation for Cloud (IAC) is the other update announced by Cisco this week. The IAC provides software which helps with managing public, private or hybrid cloud environments, as well as the physical and virtualized assets found in those bases.
The improvements to the new 3.1 of IAC will also feature the CloudSync; this offers planned or on-demand search and tracking of pieces of network infrastructure. The ability to manage numerous virtual data centers via Cisco Network Services Manager 5.0.2 version is also a new feature, and will make obsolete the purchasing of extra virtual machine management tools. Cisco has said that it wants to develop more comprehensive virtual data center flexibility tools, going beyond the offerings of variety VM management.
New Cisco acquisitions like NewScale will also be included in the software; this provides cloud management and automation tools for the company. The Cisco vice president, Intelligent Automation Services Business Unit (IASBU) and former NewScale, Scott Hammond, said: “This is about making sure the right services are in the right place – a self-service portal for managing services through approvals and creating a governance engine.”
By removing OS administrative costs, the new version will allow data centers to run more efficiently and there will be effective provisioning and cloud management tools as less resources are used and less money is spent.
The CTO for VCE, a joint Cisco-EMC venture and Vblock developer, Trey Layton, said that through merging infrastructure architectures, the IAC 3.1 update would be perfect for VCE customers.
In an email to CRN, Layton wrote: “Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud 3.1 builds upon its portal and orchestration engine with new CloudSync functionality, support for virtual data centers and the inclusion of Cisco Network Services Manager to extend its native orchestration capabilities deeper into the network layer.” (CY) Link