Cisco heralds a data center revolution

MUMBAI, INDIA: Cisco Systems, the global leader in networking, launched a new data center architecture to help customers develop next generation data centers to utilize full power of virtualization.

Cisco’s new architecture, Unified Computing, bridges the silos in the data center into a unified architecture that unites compute, network, storage access and virtualization resources. It aims to create a single energy efficient system that can reduce IT infrastructure costs and complexity, help extend capital assets and improve business agility.     

According to Andre Smit, Cisco’s managing director – Data Center Sales, Asia Pacific, the new unified computing system is an architectural solution that will transfer data centers into a more agile environment.

“It will further consolidate data centers using virtualization and increase the utilization of computing power of the existing resources,” said Smit.

However, he did point to the data center challenges such as integration of management, application, lack of coherent polices and security and at large scalability.

Calling data centers as the heart of a company, Smit said that data centers holds all key information of the company and so the new unified system will help to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO), increase business agility with improved energy efficiency.

Interestingly, Smit opined that the potential buyers or enterprises will first test some of the components of the system for 2-3 months during which they will test the integration part. Hence, after that initial phase, the solution will be in demand.

Other elements of the system include compute, network, virtualization, storage and management.

Compute is designed on Cisco UCS B- Series blades based on Intel’s Nehalem processor coming from Xeon processor to offer extended memory technology to support applications and virtual machines per server.

Network is based on unified fabric over a low-latency, lossless, 10 Gigabit per second Ethernet foundation which supports local area networks (LANs), storage area networks (SANs) and high performance computing networks.

It aims to lower costs by decreasing the number of network adapters, switches and cables that reflects in low power usage and cooling.

It consolidates access to both SAN and NAS that can support access storage over Ethernet, Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet or iSCSI, providing customers with choices and investment protection.

And the management is integrated into a single entity using Cisco UCS Manager, which provides an intuitive graphical user interface (UGI), a command line interface (CLI) and application programming interface (API) to manage all system configurations and operations.

Pete Nicholas, Cisco’s business development manager - Data Center, Asia Pacific said it is a pre-integrated system that has all components of compute, network, storage, and virtualization placed at a management layer.     

“This simplifies the data centers and removes the unnecessary switches, adapters and management modules. It offers an embedded management that saves costs on space, energy, cooling as well as reduces capital and operation expenses,” said Nicholas.

Cisco claims that it can reduce Capex  up to 20 per cent and Opex up to 30 per cent and also the system helps gain ROI in time of 9-12 months.

The system will be available in June and ordering will start from April. The system will be available by global partners of Cisco, which includes Wipro and TCS. The company will provide the solution by 30 global partners while there will be five partners in Asia Pacific. 

Both the Indian IT companies have played substantial part in development of the system, where the testing and integration was done in India while hardware designing was done in the US.