Tag Archives: Cisco
What’s the “Big Deal” about Cisco UCS ver 2.0 Fabric?
What's the "big deal" about Cisco UCS ver 2.0 fabric? Two words: bandwidth and flexibility.
Cisco recently expanded the UCS product line to include an additional Fabric Interconnect (model 6248), an additional Chassis IO Module (model 2208), as well as software release 2.0 with many new features. The new 2.0 components support existing chassis and server blades, and are back-compatible to inter-operate with existing first-generation UCS hardware (in original modes of use.)
Although the new models need not obsolete the original hardware, many of the recent Cisco UCS deployments by Ahead have opted to take advantage of the benefits of the new components.
The new 6248 Fabric Interconnect packs 48 Unified Ports into a 1 RU form factor. Any of the base Unified Ports may be configured to ...
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Building Out Ahead’s Data Center Lab Series – Part 6 – Networking Double Vision
The only thing better than one Cisco Nexus 7010 is…. You guessed it – two Nexus 7010s. As I’d mentioned months ago in this space, the lab equipment is never going to be entirely static; we’re always try to build an environment that represents both what customers are doing in their environments today, but also represents what they might start thinking about for tomorrow.
The initial round of diagrams I had put together indicated a sort of “OTV-in-a-box” (with an external L3 10GE switch to provide our L3 "cloud") approach to networking, where we were going to leverage the virtualization functionality of the Nexus 7000-series to partition 4 Virtual Device Contexts (VDCs) to parcel up the networking elements for both Data Center 1 and Data Center ...
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Building Out Ahead’s Data Center Lab Series – Part 4
After spending the bulk of the blogs on the storage devices and their role in our new data center lab, I wanted to write a bit more on the networking configuration we plan on implementing. Networking, in the context of this article, is specific to traditional LAN networking; I've left the fibre channel element out, for the most part, except where necessary. As always, our lab is in a fluid state from a configuration perspective, so some of this is subject to change. It's how we need to be to ensure that we're able to provide a dynamic and scalable environment for our customers to come in and work on.
With all of that said, there are a couple of designs I've been building out, in ...
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Cisco enters the VDI space with a bang!
Cisco announced their new VXC line of virtual desktop endpoints yesterday. In this announcement, they discussed the simplicity and elegance of integrating a virtual desktop thin-client directly into their IP phone platform. The concept is revolutionary in my mind: Take something that every worker has to have on their desk and give it the ability to provide them with desktop services as well as voice and video services.
The device I am mentioning is the VXC2100 which attaches directly to a 9971 IP phone to provide an endpoint that is capable of integrating with VMware View and Citrix VDI technology stacks. The device is the first step for Cisco in a portfolio of game-changing user access devices that are in development. As many know, Citrix has been ...
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Planes, Trains and Vblocks
Getting From Here to There
I’ve been spending a lot of time on my local commuter railway system recently. In my previous jobs, I never had the opportunity to do this, since I always found myself driving across multiple locations within a day, none of which were convenient for mass transit. With my new company, however, I find that my office and my customers are all in the downtown area, affording me the opportunity to take the train system each way on a near daily basis. I’ve also been spending a lot of time thinking about converged or stack infrastructures, and the various approaches in the industry to providing these offerings to customers.
What are you paying for?
When I board the train, and hand the conductor my ...
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