Data Center
In good economic times, "do more with less" is a motto that
helps business organizations sharpen their competitive edge. During challenging
economic times, accomplishing more with fewer resources can help organizations with
their very survival.
Nearly everyone knows the benefits of virtualization:
- Consolidate workloads; raise utilization levels; and reduce operating, capital,
space, power, and cooling expenses.
- Move workloads dynamically within a virtualization pool to increase the flexibility
to take servers offline or bring new ones online.
- Manage the relationship of virtual machines to physical machines to optimize performance
and maintain service levels.
- Scale existing applications or deploy new ones by creating more virtual machines
using an existing pool of resources.
- Use the high-availability and disaster-recovery features of virtualization software
to overcome localized and geographic failures.
Virtualization decouples application deployment from server
purchases, but this and the other benefits of virtualization are best achieved when
applications run on one or more uniform pools of server resources. The Cisco Unified
Computing System™ is designed to provide just such an environment. Optimized for
virtualized environments, the Cisco Unified Computing System is a next-generation
data center platform that unites compute, network, storage access, and virtualization
into a cohesive system designed to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and increase
business agility. The system integrates a low-latency, lossless 10 Gigabit Ethernet
unified network fabric with enterprise-class, x86-architecture servers. The system
is an integrated, scalable, multi-chassis platform in which all resources participate
in a unified management domain.
Unified Fabric
The unified fabric enables a "wire once" deployment model
in which chassis are cabled to the fabric interconnects just one time, and I/O configurations
changes are performed through the management system, not by installing host adapters
and re-cabling racks and switches (Figure 1). The unified fabric dramatically simplifies
rack cabling by eliminating the need for multiple redundant Ethernet and Fiber Channel
adapters in each server, separate cabling to access-layer switches, and separate
switches for each network medium. Instead, all traffic is routed to the central
server interconnects, where Ethernet and Fiber Channel then can be separated onto
native, nonconsolidated networks.