Data Center

In the previous article we looked at some of the physical characteristics of building a SAN extension. In other words, we looked at the different ways there are to “build the pipe.” We didn’t, however, get the chance to talk about the speed or capacity of the pipes, nor did we talk…

I have heard this a lot over the years, in one way or another – “The only price that really counts is what I actually pay for my server.”  Alright, so why bother with a TCO analysis?  The truth is that server acquisition costs only contribute 20% (or less) to a 3 year server TCO.  Management and ot…

Ivy Bridge comes to UCS! As Paul Perez reminds us in his evolutionary metaphor for our industry, time marches on, and today brings another tick of the clock. Many of you may be familiar with the development cadence that Intel maintains to carry forward the exponential burden of Moore’s law. By way o…

On September 10th, 2013 Cisco introduced support for the Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2600 v2 product family on the Cisco UCS B200 M3, C240 M3, and C220 M3 servers.  On the same day as the Intel announcement Cisco captured seven world records on industry benchmarks on Cisco UCS to highlight the breadth…

Our first SecureDC twitter chat created some great industry dialog around security for Software Defined Networks (SDN) as well as using SDN to improve security. SDN is going through a similar hype cycle as seen with cloud and we feel that it’s important to focus more on education now and broader col…

It’s a beautiful thing when you can hijack four not-quite random people off the VMworld show floor and get them to tackle a discussion on desktop virtualization.  And that’s exactly what we did a couple weeks back, when the opportunity presented itself.  With Courtney Burry (VMware), Mike Brennan (C…

In an earlier blog, I discussed the incredible success behind the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) in Darwinian evolutionary terms.  Since I wrote that blog three months ago, we’ve continued to grow rapidly and have strengthened our position as the #2 blade server player worldwide from 19.3% to…

In the last article, we looked at the big picture of what is involved in creating a SAN distance extension. In this article, we’re going to take a slightly closer look at the physical requirements and with luck we’ll be able to clear up some general confusion and misconceptions along the…

A long time ago I got asked to write about how to use Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) for distance. After all, we were getting the same question over and over: What is the distance limitation for FCoE? Now, the short answer for this can be checking out various data sheets for the Nexus 2000, Nexu…