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What do UC in UCS?

August 8, 2011 By Infosmack View Comments
planet rickatron

Planet Zircon

In this week’s Deep Dive episode Rick (aka ‘the Rickatron’) is outnumbered 3:1 by Brits as the infrastructure inquisitors turn the spotlight on to Cisco UCS. The static at the opening is not your internet connection – it’s the beginning of an Infosmack sci-fi theater (or is that theatre?) segment where Nigel and the Rickatron gather intelligence from the planet Zircon on the mystical Cisco UCS platform. Nigel claims this was inspired by comments from Leo Apotheker (CEO of HP) who once said that he had never seen a Cisco UCS and that if Cisco were selling any it must be on planet Zircon. This opening sets a new water mark of some sort. High or low? We’d appreciate your comments on twitter. Joining Nigel and Rick this week are two independent practitioners of UCS; Chris Dearden and David Owen Topics covered in this Deep Dive include:

  • Service profiles
  • Extended memory
  • Innovation and keeping ahead
  • What is different about Cisco UCS and is it really game changing
  • Why Cisco is in the server market

At the end of the show both Rick’s and Nigel’s interest is stirred but neither are necessarily convinced, and the door is left wide open for further exploration. Thoughts, comments and feedback welcome – @nigelpoulton @rickvanover @infosmack DON’T MISS AN EPISODE – SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE!

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  • http://www.briangracely.com bgracely

    [disclosure - Cisco employee]

    Listened to the podcast today and the group did a nice job of discussing many of the unique elements of Cisco UCS and questioning if they are “game changing” or truly unique. Fair analysis. I wanted to clarify some points that were made:

    1 – If any of your listeners would like to test-drive the Cisco UCS, they can download the free UCS Emulator (runs as a VM) for free from our developer site – http://developer.cisco.com/web/unifiedcomputing/start

    2 – If any of your listeners would like to view how UCS works, here is an excellent set of educational videos/demos – http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/ps10265/ucs_advantage_video_library.html

    3 – While UCS Manager (UCSM) does use Java, it is just a Java implementation of an interface that resides on top of the UCS API. Customers (Ent/SP) could write an entirely new interface on top of the API in the language they prefer. We provide a tool (goUCS) that provides developers with access to all the API commands and syntax for any add-on or replacement tools they wish to create. All of this is available (free) at http://developer.cisco.com/web/unifiedcomputing/start. And as was mentioned on the show, Powershell support will be out of Beta very soon. We’re already seeing people write unique interfaces for UCS, such as this iPhone app – http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/managing_your_cisco_ucs_from_an_iphone_or_ipad/

    4 – There seemed to be concern about which team would manage Cisco UCS, since it combines Server/Network/Storage into a unified system. The UCSM allows role-based access to the system such that individual teams could be given permissions to setup/manage specific functions (eg. Storage provisioning). So the system doesn’t force a customer to retrain or reorganize their IT groups to fit the system.

    5 – The scale/simplicity of UCS Manager wasn’t really discussed on the show. This is a unique design that will significantly help operations teams, as they can manage 20+ chassis from a single interface, without added mamagement in each chassis. This significantly reduces the points of management, points of failure, costs of management and simplifies moves/adds/changes/upgrades.

    6 – There was a question about roadmaps and next-generations of Cisco UCS. Here is an excellent write-up for UCSM 2.0, which will be available very soon – http://www.mseanmcgee.com/2011/07/ucs-2-0-cisco-stacks-the-deck-in-las-vegas/#more-817

    We’re glad to hear that UCS has peaked your interest (at least for Nigel) and that you’ve also expressed interest in learning more about Nexus 1000v and the added functionality it can bring to virtualized Data Centers. If you’d like to speak with people in more depth about these products, please feel free to contact us (@ciscoDC).

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