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Cisco

Cisco, Microsoft Team Up For Data Center Virtualization Solutions

September 22, 2011 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Cisco has announced that is partnering with Microsoft to deliver data center virtualization solutions designed to provide improved scalability and operational control of Microsoft Windows Server “8” virtual environments.

The Cisco Nexus 1000V distributed virtual switch and the Cisco Unified Computing System with Virtual Machine Fabric Extender (VM-FEX) capabilities will work with the Windows Server Hyper-V hypervisor to provide customers with Cisco networking features that are constant across both virtual and physical networks while supporting customers’ existing IT management processes.

The Cisco Nexus 1000V distributed virtual switch adds the dynamic provisioning and management capabilities of Cisco NX-OS Software to Windows Server Hyper-V to simplify the operations of virtual networking infrastructures as extensions of physical networks.

It also provides full VM-level visibility, security controls in a virtualized environment that are consistent with their Cisco physical network.

By working with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) management tools, the Cisco Nexus 1000V will help network, virtualization and server administrators gain efficiency in collaboratively managing multi-tenant and mobile virtual environments. It also helps them to obtain real-time data for troubleshooting of virtual environments.

The Cisco Nexus 1000V and VM-FEX solutions for Hyper-V will be available when Windows 8 Server is released to the market.

Filed Under: Partnerships Tagged With: Cisco, Cisco Nexus 1000V, Cisco Unified Computing System, Hyper-V, microsoft, Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, Virtual Machine Fabric Extender, VM-FEX, Windows Server, Windows Server Hyper-V

Cisco Touts 4,000 Customers For Its Unified Computing System, And Other Milestones

February 22, 2011 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Cisco this morning announced a series of customer and technology milestones across the Unified Fabric, Unified Computing System and Unified Network Services technology portfolios which form the foundation of its Data Center Business Advantage architectural framework.

Cisco announced that it has shipped its one millionth Nexus 10Gb Ethernet port, bringing the total number of Nexus ports in customer production environments to more than 7,000,000.

The company also surpassed 10,000 NX-OS customers and neared 4,000 Unified Computing Systems customers at the end of its fiscal second quarter.

The Nexus and UCS families of products are vital assets in Cisco’s cloud computing portfolio. They provide the building blocks for virtualized data center and private cloud environments, and are already deployed by enterprises for private cloud applications such as desktop virtualization, hosted voice, video, collaboration and security.

UCS and Nexus have been implemented for cloud services at service providers such as AlphaWest, Cincinnati Bell, Navisite, Orange Business Services, PINS, Rackspace, Radiant, Savvis and Terremark.

Cisco announced today that it has reached nearly 4,000 customers for its Unified Computing System, eighteen months since the first generation of the platform shipped. In excess of 1,000 of these customers are said to be repeat purchasers of UCS.

As of Cisco’s fiscal year second quarter 2011, Cisco’s Unified Computing System revenue grew more than 700% year-over-year, bringing the UCS annualized revenue run rate to $650M.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Cisco, Cisco Systems, Cisco Unified Computing System, Unified Computing System

TheAdmins Introduces 24×7 Tech Support On All Things Citrix, Microsoft, VMware and Cisco

July 30, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

TheAdmins, a value-added reseller (VAR) providing virtualization, application delivery, data security, network infrastructure and storage/business continuity services, today announced the introduction of its Continuous Support Offering (CSO).

TheAdmins CSO is a service level agreement (SLA)-based support service designed to supplement IT services staff in resolving technology-critical issues with select Citrix, Microsoft, VMware and Cisco products.

Traditionally, companies have purchased IT services support agreements directly from manufacturers to serve as a lifeline in the event of an emergency. However, the reality is that many of these agreements serve as a mere insurance policy, and if unused, result in lost fees – only to be renewed again the following year. Also, manufacturer support is typically limited to the manufacturing company’s product line only – resulting in very specific and restricted support.

Products currently supported through TheAdmins CSO include:

  • All Citrix products
  • Microsoft (Active Directory, Messaging and Windows Server)
  • VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 (VI4 support coming soon)
  • Cisco (routing and switching)

Service level agreement response time is as follows:

  • One-hour for telephone support
  • Four-hour for on-site coverage for New Jersey, New York City and Philadelphia

TheAdmins CSO is available now to new and existing TheAdmins customers. The cost of the service is $6,250 annually for 25 support hours, which can be used for telephone or on-site support seven days a week, 24 hours a day.

Upon depletion of the purchased hours, replenishment options are available. Any time remaining at the end of 12 months may be used for other TheAdmins IT services, such as projects, staff supplementation, system management and troubleshooting.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Cisco, citrix, microsoft, support, tech support, the adminds, theadminds cso, theadmins, VAR, virtualisation, virtualization, vmware

Industry Moves: Christofer Hoff Joins Cisco

June 9, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

We almost missed it, but apparently mr. Christofer Hoff has joined the Cisco Data Center Solutions team.

Best of luck, @Beaker!

(Via Cisco Blogs)

Filed Under: People Tagged With: christofer hoff, Cisco, Cisco Data Center Solutions, industry moves, rational survivability, virtsec, virtualisation, virtualization

IBM Walks Away From Talks Over Potential Sun Acquisition

April 6, 2009 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

IBM has withdrawn its $7 billion bid for Sun Microsystems today (Sunday), reports the NY Times, who confirmed the collapse of the talks based on a statement from an unnamed source while several other media, including the Wall Street Journal and ZDNet, were still speculating. The New York Times correctly points out this leaves Sun free to pursue other opportunities for selling itself.

Since last year, Sun executives had been meeting with potential buyers. I.B.M. stepped up, seeing an opportunity to add to its large software business, acquire valuable researchers and consolidate the market for larger, so-called server computers that corporations use in their data centers.

In their talks, I.B.M. and Sun had a contract to deal with each other exclusively. Now, Sun is free to pursue other suitors, including I.B.M. rivals like Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems. Cisco recently entered the market for server computers.

It will be interesting to watch the market react to this on Monday morning.

Filed Under: Featured Tagged With: acquisition, Cisco, Cisco Systems, deal, HP, i.b.m., IBM, international business machines, sun, sun microsystems, virtualisation, virtualization

Exclusive – Cisco’s Unified Computing Platform: The Details

March 16, 2009 by Lode Vermeiren 3 Comments

Today Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) will unveil its long-awaited server line, one of the building blocks that was still missing from their Unified Computing vision. This announcement is bound to shake up the IT industry in general, and the x86 server market in particular. Even though this market has several well established players like IBM, Dell, HP and to a lesser extent Sun, Cisco is determined to extend its already impressive datacenter footprint to this market as well.

What Cisco CEO John Chambers called “Datacenter 3.0” during his keynote at VMworld back in september 2007 has now been rebranded as “Unified Computing”. Different name, same concept.

Cisco emphasises that this is a big new concept, where the most important part is the (unified) network and the integrated management. We suppose the traditional server manufacturers beg to differ.

Without further ado, we’ve got the scoop on the juicy details:

  • Cisco California blade servers come in a new chassis (unlike for example Intel, whose now defunct Enterprise Blade Server line consisted of rebranded IBM kit).
  • The chassis has 8 slots, that can fit 8 half-width or 4 full-width blades. At the bottom of the chassis there are 4 power modules, on both sides there are two “FEX”es, or Fabric Extenders.
  • Each of the 8 slots has got a 10 Gb connection to one of the two Fabric Extenders.
  • The blades come in two models, both with two sockets, populated with Intel Xeon CPU’s based on the Core i7 (“Nehalem“) microarchitecture. The half-width blades have got 12 memory slots, the full-width have a whopping 48 memory banks. By leveraging the next generation Intel architecture, this allows for an unmatched memory density, which has traditionally been the bottleneck in virtualized environments. (Providing 384 Gb requires crazy expensive 8 Gb dimms. Using cheaper 4 Gb dimms still allows for an impressive 192 Gb of memory per blade.)
  • There are no dedicated management or switching modules in the chassis. The FEXes connect to the UCS 6100 (UCS = Unified Computing Switch), which is based on the Nexus 5020 switch. The UCS6100 is a “top of rack” switch that will carry the TCP/IP data, block level data (through FCoE) and the management of the system. By externalizing this management and switching, Cisco makes it easier to upgrade their chassis to new technologies later on, and it keeps as much of the environment as possible close to the network core, their traditional turf, treating the server as a commodity. The UCS communicates with a management chip on each blade to manage and monitor the server components. This management solution was co-developed with BMC.

Cisco will undoubtedly emphasise how this is a solution, based on a network architecture. As Christopher Hoff puts it at his Rational Security blog: It walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, but it’s a solution.

Now, how will the market react to this announcement is unknown. HP, IBM and the likes pretend to be unimpressed by their new competitor, but it’s worth noting Cisco might be on to something:

  • The more customers use virtualization, the more they need central management whereas the underlying servers become interchangeable building blocks. By integrating the management in the network switching, Cisco can reinforce their stronghold in the heart of the datacenter.
  • Cisco is a new player. They arent’ experienced in the server market, but they also could start designing their solution from the ground up, learning from mistakes made by their competitors. Expect them to try to silence potential criticts with a global service organisation (in partnership with Accenture and local partners), reference customers (Savvis is named to be a beta customer) and certifications by the likes of VMware, Oracle and SAP.
  • Fiber Channel and Ethernet are on a path to convergence. Storage vendors are preparing or shipping FCoE-capable arrays. (It’s likely EMC and/or NetApp will show up at the announcement later today.) Brocade, Cisco’s biggest competitor in the SAN market, knows this as well, but their aqcuisition of Foundry Networks was delayed by some shareholders. Their product lines will likely stay separate for several quarters to come, whilst Cisco is shipping a unified product line today.
  • Cisco is alienating their current partners like IBM and HP. This was inevitable however, as HP was already moving into Cisco’s market with their ProCurve switches, IBM has always courted multiple brides, and is now intensifying its relationship with Juniper. In a down economy, it’s everyone to himself. It is also the opportunity for challengers to enter new markets. Cisco has got a $30 billion piggy bank, a result of their average 65% margins. They can afford a fight, and we’re likely to see one, no matter how hard IBM, HP and even Cisco want to downplay the significance of this announcement.

It’s obvious VMware is involved in this play as well. They’ve been talking about the “software mainframe” for quite a while now, Chambers introduced “Datacenter 3.0” at VMworld in 2007, and Cisco is a minority shareholder in VMware.

Update: VMware has already put out its press release and a YouTube video in which CEO Paul Maritz talks about Unified computing.
Update: The Cisco press release is out as well.
Pictures are over at Flickr, and in the data sheet.

Cisco has published a full list of partners:

  • Accenture
  • BMC
  • EMC
  • Intel
  • Microsoft
  • NetApp
  • Novell
  • Red Hat
  • VMware

Stay tuned for the Cisco announcement later today. The webcast starts at 10:30 AM Pacific Time, 18:30 CET. You can tune in at Cisco.com.

Filed Under: Featured, News Tagged With: california, Cisco, cisco california, Cisco Systems, cisco unified computing, details, exclusive, Featured, network, Platform, unified computing, virtualisation, virtualization

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