More on Cisco UCS, HP Matrix and ITaaS
I just finished reading Project California: a Data Center Virtualization Server – UCS (Unified Computing System) from Cisco. It gave an excellent take on Cisco’s view of how UCS benefits a datacenter. It also explains how new technologies from Intel, QLogic and Emulex all complement the Cisco gear. As a matter of fact, the first four chapters are all about the complementing technologies. Obviously, it is all twisted into a nice package that Cisco offers as their Unified Computing System. Its a great, educational geek book.
The UCS depends on several enabling technologies, like FCoE. FCoE allows you to take your existing Fibre Channel investment and send it down an ethernet channel. A big FAT 10GbE channel. The benefit here is that you can have eight cables feed everything to eight blades and have a nice neat rack. But Scott Lowe points out some limitations on his blog. Right now, it appears that Cisco’s FCoE will terminate at the top of the rack with the Nexus 5000. The book explains how iSCSI is a great alternative and you don’t even need a CNA to make that work, but you need an iSCSI interface on the storage system. So the UCS requires change at some point in the data path.
