While not particularly new news, the next version of the Cisco Nexus 1000v will be free, unless you want the security features. This is an interesting shift from Cisco with respect to VMware vCloud Director, the Nicira purchase, furthering UCS, and Cisco within non-UCS data centers. However, given other announcements, with respect to OpenStack, perhaps this is more a play to level the playing field between cloud architectures? But what I find most interesting, is that the changes to the Nexus 1000v also align with the changes we see in the vCloud Suites from VMware.
TVP Tag Archives
Appliance Makers Simplify VDI Adoption
The growing availability of prepackaged appliances is making VDI increasingly attractive for customers who value the benefits of VDI. It is not only customers that benefit from this increased simplicity, smaller system integrators lack the appropriate skills to size and sell complex in VDI infrastructure environments can take advantage of these appliance-based solutions to compete with larger system integrators that have led the way in VDI implementation services.
2012: The Year of Software Defined Networking
The start of VMworld 2012 and the biggest Virtualization conference of the year is less than two weeks away and the surge of marketing emails have started to arrive about all the new and exciting offerings that the venders and 3rd party companies are planning on showing off at VMworld. This is one of the things I enjoy the most about attending these conferences, seeing what’s new and to see the direction of the trends in virtualization. At last year’s show, VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas, the trend that I saw was the advancements in storage and storage virtualization. My prediction at the end of VMworld 2011 was that 2012 would be the year for the network virtualization and or software defined networking.
Unified Computing: Collective Group or Single Responsibility
I have spent a great deal of time lately working with the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS). This computing platform is really quite impressive with its power and flexibility, but my expectations about the platform have really changed since I completed the UCS training. During the training classes that I attended, both the design and install courses emphasized that the Cisco UCS platform would be a collaborative platform that would bring the different groups like Storage, Network, and Server each working their own functional area of responsibility within UCS based on role permissions. That sounded great. The network team can create and trunk the VLANS and the storage team could add the boot targets as well as assign the LUNS. This platform is a true collective effort by all teams right?
Defense in Depth: Firewalls within the Virtual Environment
The 6/14 Virtualization Security Podcast we spoke about firewall placement within the virtual environment as well as storage based defense in depth. While we covered Encryption on the 5/31 podcast, in the 6/14 podcast we covered other measures when dealing with storage (which will be part of a followup post). This conversation was slightly different than all other firewall discussions, as it was about migrating from a physical environment to a virtual environment, and keeping the same firewall placements. Spurred by a customer, we sought to come to a set of guidelines to follow for defense in depth within the virtual as well as physical and hybrid cloud environments.
Cisco puts Cius on hold as BYOD growth kills the enterprise tablet
The continued growth of BYOD and the increased maturity of mobile device management and mobile application management tools have forced Cisco to rethink both its enterprise collaboration strategy and its tablet strategy. Cisco came early to the enterprise tablet market announcing the Cius in mid-2010 just 3 months after Apple launched the first generation iPad.