Data Center overview (2)- Computing

Challenges

Application

• Larger number of endpoints to manage and flexible infrastructure needed to support both traditional and less monolithinc applications
• Quick rolling out of new applications and updates of existing ones is important, demading the capability to program IT team's one infrastructure

Management

• Managing infrastructure at scale in a simple, holistic fashion
• Being able to match resources to application requirements

Locations

• Must supports clients, applications, and workloads in public, managed, edge, and private cloud environment

Solutions

Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS)

Cisco UCS combines servers, networking, and management in a cohesive system. Customers can choose what's best for their applications: blade, rack, storage or multi-node server.

Each Cisco UCS domain is established with a pair of Cisco UCS fabric interconnects, with a comprehensive set of options for connecting blade, rack, (blade and rack servers are the most commonly used ones in the DC) multinode, and storage servers to them either directly or indirectly.

 

Attributes

1. Fabric Centric

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.

 

2. Endpoint aware

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.

 

3. 100% programmable

With a completely programmable system, you can give your clients the level of control they need to manage their workloads. For global organizations, Cisco IntersightTM software-as- a-service management gives you complete role- and policy-based controlover all of your resources regardless of where they reside.

 

4. Intent based

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.

 

5. Delivers business benefits

• 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.

 

6, Analytics powered

The recommendation engine built into 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.

 

In summary,

- Easy to provision

- Easy to change configuration

- Easy to replace HW

- Decreased downtime/OpEx

- 100% Programmable

- Fabric Centric Design: single cable for network, storage, and management traffic

- Easy to scale

- Unified Management

Components

• Blade server chassis
• Blade (Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers)
• Rack
• Multinode
• Storage-intensive servers
• Fabric Interconnect and Extender
• Converged infrastructure
• Hyperconverged infrastructure (HyperFlex) 
• UCS management (UCS Manager)

Cisco UCS component hierarchy

*Blade server vs Rack server

Blade Server vs Rack Server

 

1) Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers

• For mainstream computing
• Provide massive amounts of computing power in a compact form factor 
• Help increase density in computation-intensitve and enterprise application environments

• Deploy applications faster and manage connectivity as needed

• Reduce the number of adapters, cables, and access-layer switches needed for management, LAN and SAN connectivity

2) Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers

• For scaling out
• Can integrate into Cisco UCS through UCS fabric interconnects OR be used as standalone servers with Cisco or third-party switches 
• Cisco UCS C480 ML rack server is designed for artificial intelligence and ML workloads, designed to accelerate model training, offering latest generation of Intel Xeon CPU with flexible CPU options

3) Cisco UCS S-Series Storage Servers

• For data intensive computing
• Modular servers that support storage-intensive workloads including big data, content streaming, online backup and storage as a service applications 
• Offers the flexibility of compute processing to balance the needed storage for workloads like big data, data protections and software defined storage