It has been just over two years that the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) was announced and released to the world. I wanted to give my feedback on the progress of the platform and how it is fitting into the Cloud Computing space.
When Cisco announced their Unified Computing Platform a couple of years ago, the thinking was not to just design and get into the server business, Cisco’s goal was to and become the heart of the datacenter itself. This was a big move by Cisco considering, that they had a very good working relationship and partnership with HP well, at least until the announcement that Cisco was getting into the server business.
One of the very first questions presented to the Virtualization Architects when planning and designing a new deployment, for as long as I have been working with virtualization technology. To scale up or scale out, that is the question and philosophy that has flip flopped back and forth as the technology itself has improved and functionality increased.
With the announcement of V-Block and Cisco UCS as a major component, is more hypervisor functionality going to end up in hardware? UCS adds some interesting features into the hardware that were traditionally within the purview of the hypervisor. Now it looks like V-Block is the assembly of myriad components that taken as a whole look remarkably like the beginnings of a hardware based hypervisor.
The problem is that neither VMware, nor any disk array vendor has explicitly announced support for it.
We all remember the fanfare that sounded on the release of the UCS Blade technology, well Cisco have just quietly snuck an announcement out of the door about some rack mounted brothers for the Blades, now these are as usual “more than just a rack mount server” they are the next addition in the “unified compute space”.
Things have been very busy at Cisco today in addition to the new that they are to release a Rack mounted version of there UCS servere. the Networking giant and server newboy on the block Cisco Systems announced that will be working with third-party blade server makers to create a version of its Nexus family of switches that tuck inside non-Cisco blades.
