CISCO – Unified Computing

System
Unified Computing and Data Center
Evolution
Data center virtualization has created a market transition where IT
organizations are trying to reduce costs and increase flexibility. The typical
data center environment supports two to three parallel networks: one for
data, one for storage, and possibly one for server clustering. In addition,
servers often have dedicated interfaces for management, backup, or virtual
machine live migration. Supporting these interfaces imposes significant
costs related to interfaces, cabling, rack space, upstream switches, and
power and cooling.
Unified fabric consolidates these different types of traffic onto a single,
general-purpose, high-performance, highly available network that greatly
simplifies the network infrastructure and reduces costs, delivering
intelligence to identify the different types of traffic and handle them
appropriately. In addition to reducing total cost of ownership, unified fabric
supports broader data center virtualization by providing consistent,
ubiquitous network and storage services to all connected devices. This
next-generation data center approach decouples scale from complexity.

• Unites computing, networking, storage access, and virtualization

into a cohesive system
• Integrates a low-latency, lossless 10 Gb Ethernet unified network
fabric with enterprise-class, x86-architecture servers
• This approach decouples scale from complexity. Whether the system
has 1 server or 320 servers with thousands of virtual machines, all
resources participate in a unified management domain designed to:
• Reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) at the platform, site, and
organizational levels
• Increase IT staff productivity and business agility through just-in-
time provisioning and mobility support
• The system incorporates:
• A standards-based unified network fabric supported by a partner
ecosystem of industry leaders
• Cisco VN-Link virtualization support
• Cisco Extended Memory Technology

An overview:
With a "normal" blade infrastructure, UCS takes pieces from every corner of
the IT pie -- storage, network, servers, and management -- and put them
together. Each blade chassis will have some number of Ethernet and SAN
interfaces, either grouped using internal switching with uplinks or dedicated
on a per-blade basis, and these interfaces are then connected to a larger
Fibre Channel and Ethernet network. Thus, each chassis exists as an island
within the datacenter, and each blade exists as an island within the chassis.
Management frameworks surround these pieces and typically tie them
together in some fashion, but the reality is that today's blade infrastructures
are more akin to closely grouped banks of separate servers than a bundle
or pool. That's where UCS differs significantly.
The UCS model dispenses with fixed ports and internal switching. It
removes the smarts from the chassis as well. Each chassis is essentially
just sheet metal and a backplane. No switching occurs within a chassis; the
chassis is simply an extension of the UCS fabric, which is driven by two
redundant Fabric Interconnects. These are not switches, but might be
thought of as controllers.
The Cisco UCS 6120XP FI has 20 10Gb Ethernet ports and an expansion
slot for 4Gbps Fibre Channel connections to a SAN. Each port can be
designated as a server or uplink port, with the chassis connected to the
server ports, and the larger LAN connected via the uplink ports. Drop in
Fibre Channel connections to your SAN and you're done. Cabling a UCS
deployment is extremely simple and requires very few cables per chassis --
up to eight if you need all that bandwidth, but four should be more than
enough for most cases.

The fabric is the computer

Unlike the traditional model, there are no dedicated Fibre Channel or
Ethernet links in the chassis -- everything is Ethernet. When a blade
communicates with the SAN via FC, those packets are encapsulated into
FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) and broken out into straight FC in the
Fabric Interconnect. When a blade communicates via Ethernet, that's
shipped straight out along the same pipes. In this way, Cisco has greatly
simplified the overall architecture and makes better use of available
bandwidth, whether for network or storage or both.
This architecture has many benefits, the most notable being immense
scalability. With each chassis treated like a hot-swap line card in a switch,
adding chassis is as simple as plugging them in. Since UCS chassis have
no brains, they don't require any configuration. They're also cheap when
compared to "smart" chassis from other vendors, since they do not have
internal management or switching requirements. Thus, UCS is expensive
with one or two chassis, but once you get to three, it becomes significantly
cheaper.

Each Fabric Interconnect can handle up to nine redundantly connected

chassis with 20Gb connections to each FI, assuming two 10Gb uplinks to
the LAN and a Fibre Channel expansion card. That's 72 blades per pair of
UCS 6120XP 20-port FIs. The forthcoming UCS 6140 series doubles those
ports to address up to 144 redundant blades, all driven from a single set of
FIs. If you forgo dual-fabric redundancy and link each chassis with a single
10Gb connection to each redundant fabric, those numbers double. Any way
you slice it, UCS is amazingly scalable.
The management is also greatly simplified. There are no server-based
management components or external packages required; everything is
driven from a single elegant Java GUI or CLI run directly from the Fabric
Interconnects themselves. The entire configuration for any UCS
implementation is a single XML file that can be copied to a backup location
at a whim. Restoring the configuration is equally simple. In fact, the XML
API available with UCS makes custom scripting a breeze with anything from
Perl to Ruby on Rails.
Also, UCS is completely hierarchical. Rather than building servers, you build
service profile templates and service profiles. Profiles are divorced from
physical servers and can exist on any blade at any time. Creating profiles
for commonly deployed servers is simple, and servers can be built from
those templates at a whim. It may take 30 minutes from start to finish to
deploy a dozen blades with VMware vSphere, for instance. That's starting at
scratch and ending with 12 running ESX servers. The hardest part is dealing
with the storage, which is outside of UCS's purview.

What is Stateless Computing in UCS

In Unified Computing system (UCS) the underlying hardware (or server) can
be made completely transparent to the OS or applications that run over it.
The kind of environment which an OS or application requires can be moved
from one server to another or can be changed very easily. This is made
possible by moving resources, such as MAC addresses, WWN values, IP
addresses, UUID, firmware versions and even server BIOS, from one server
to another at the time of deploying the server. This is accomplished by using
the concept of Service profiles; which is like software definition of a server.
Service Profiles allows to manage your system holistically by combining
Hardware, Networking and Virtual Components into one preconfigured
template.To meet business demands is as simple as deploying your service
profiles into blades.The concept of stateless computing facilitates much
greater scalability and can be used in conjunction with virtualization to
achieve maximum data center utilization.

Stateless Computing Overview

Various resources responsible to make the stateless nature are:

a) MAC addresses and WWN values: These can be moved form one server
to another server as defined in service profile.
b) UUID value: UUID acts like an identity to the server and can be moved
from one server to another.

c) Firmware and BIOS revisions: As per requirement, firmware and BIOS

versions can be applied to the servers.

As per the application requirements the above values can be changed and
so the application can easily run on any of the server blades with the same
compatibility. These values can be easily changed using the UCS manager
and can be applied to the server before installing the OS or the application

An example:

As the picture show above, it is the high level architecture which requires to
run the entire UCS solution from Cisco. Not necessary every environment
will require Nexus 7000, it is meant for large scale networking environment.
You may go with various different switches to replace the Nexus 7000 in the
picture depending on your requirement. In the current UCS release, the
UCS 6100 interconnect fabric will integrate with the MDS 9000 series Fiber
Channel environment or others compatible FC switches. This allow UCS
blade I/O to be consolidated with CNA with 10Gbps per connection as
FCoE. This had significant reduce the physical cabling requirement per
blade chassis.

Both the Nexus and UCS products are part of Cisco’s “Data Centre 3.0”
product line, which also includes the MDS 9148 switch, which is for storage-
area networks. It has 48 Fiber Channel ports that can transfer data at up to
8 Gbps.
The Cisco Unified Computing System is built from
the following components:
Cisco UCS 6100 Series Fabric Interconnects

A core part of the Cisco Unified Computing System, the Cisco UCS 6100
Series Fabric Interconnects provide both network connectivity and
management capabilities to all attached blades and chassis. The Cisco
UCS 6100 Series offers line-rate, low-latency, lossless 10 Gigabit Ethernet
and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) functions.
The interconnects provide the management and communication backbone
for the Cisco UCS B-Series Blades and UCS 5100 Series Blade Server
Chassis. All chassis, and therefore all blades, attached to the interconnects
become part of a single, highly available management domain. In addition,
by supporting unified fabric, the Cisco UCS 6100 Series provides both the
LAN and SAN connectivity for all blades within its domain.
Typically deployed in redundant pairs, fabric interconnects provide uniform
access to both networks and storage, eliminating the barriers to deploying a
fully virtualized environment. Two models are available: the 20-port Cisco
UCS 6120XP and the 40-port Cisco UCS 6140XP.
Both models offer key features and benefits, including:
• High performance Unified Fabric with line-rate, low-latency, lossless 10
Gigabit Ethernet, and FCoE.
• Centralized unified management with Cisco UCS Manager software.
• Virtual machine optimized services with the support for VN-Link
technologies.
• Efficient cooling and serviceability with front-to-back cooling, redundant
front-plug fans and power supplies, and rear cabling.
• Available expansion module options provide Fibre Channel and/or 10
Gigabit Ethernet uplink connectivity.

Cisco UCS 5100 Series Blade Server Chassis:

The Cisco UCS 5100 Series Blade Server Chassis is a crucial building block
of the Cisco Unified Computing System, delivering a scalable and flexible
architecture for current and future data center needs, while helping reduce
total cost of ownership.
Cisco's first blade-server chassis offering, the Cisco UCS 5108 Blade
Server Chassis, is six rack units (6RU) high, can mount in an industry-
standard 19-inch rack, and uses standard front-to-back cooling. A chassis
can accommodate up to eight half-width, or four full-width Cisco UCS B-
Series Blade Servers form factors within the same chassis.
The Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Server Chassis revolutionizes the use and
deployment of blade-based systems. By incorporating unified fabric and
fabric-extender technology, the Cisco Unified Computing System enables
the chassis to:
• Have fewer physical components
• Require no independent management
• Be more energy efficient than traditional blade-server chassis
This simplicity eliminates the need for dedicated chassis management and
blade switches, reduces cabling, and allowing scalability to 40 chassis
without adding complexity. The Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Server Chassis is a
critical component in delivering the simplicity and IT responsiveness for the
data center as part of the Cisco Unified Computing System.

Cisco UCS 2100 Series Fabric Extenders:

Cisco UCS 2100 Series Fabric Extenders connect the Cisco UCS 5100
Series Blade Server Chassis to the Cisco UCS 6100 Series Fabric
Interconnects and help simplify cabling, management, and diagnostics.
The fabric extender extends the I/O fabric between the fabric interconnects
and the blade-server chassis, enabling a lossless and deterministic Fire
Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) fabric to connect all blades and chassis
together.
The first product in the series, the Cisco UCS 2104XP Fabric Extender,
provides key benefits including the following:
• Reduced TCO through the use of FCoE, which enables significant
component reduction
• High-speed, low-latency, FCoE-capable 10 Gigabit Ethernet to the chassis
• Up to two fabric extenders per chassis, which allows redundancy and
increased bandwidth
• Hardware-based support for Cisco VN-Link architecture, helping optimize
virtualized environments
• Built-in logic to manage chassis components including fans and power
• Simplified management -the fabric extender is fully managed through the
fabric interconnect

Fabric Extender - or Fexlink -architecture, designed to connect switches

with servers using either Ethernet, Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) or
iSCSI. Cisco claims this will give its servers up to 160 Gigabits per second
per blade

Cisco claims companies can reduce cabling costs by up to 80 per cent by

using Fexlink, which is on both the UCS servers and Nexus 5000 switches.

Cisco’s Nexus 2232 fabric extender, also announced Tuesday, provides 10

Gigabit Ethernet and Fiber Channel over Ethernet connectivity, which is a
 standard for storage networks. The Nexus 2248 fabric extender provides
100 Mbps and Gigabit Ethernet bandwidth.

Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers

Reduced capital and operating expenses with the converged network

fabrics and integrated systems management of Cisco UCS B-Series Blade
Servers.
Enhanced Performance with 2-Socket Servers
Based on Intel Xeon 5500 and Xeon 5600 Series processors, 2-socket
Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers work with virtualized and nonvirtualized
applications to increase:
• Performance
• Energy efficiency
• Flexibility
The Cisco UCS B200 M1 and UCS B200 M2 Blade Servers balance
simplicity, performance, and density for production-level virtualization and
other mainstream data center workloads.
The Cisco UCS B250 M1 and UCS B250 M2 Extended Memory Blade
Servers:
• Increase performance and capacity for demanding virtualization and large
data-set workloads with up to 384 GB of memory
• Offer a more cost-effective memory footprint for less demanding
workloads
The Cisco UCS B230 M1 Blade Server combines the performance of Intel
Xeon 6500 or 7500 processors with up to 32 dual in-line memory module
(DIMM) slots to:
• Improve virtualization performance
• Reduce CPU core and software license costs
• Help enable more virtual machines
Extended Agility with 4-Socket Servers
Extend the agility and cost benefits of unified computing to a wider range of
workloads with a 4-socket Cisco UCS B440 M1 High-Performance Blade
Server. Powered by the scalable performance and reliability features of up
to four Intel Xeon 7500 Series processors, this blade server easily handles
compute-intensive, enterprise-critical applications.
Compare virtual interface cards and converged network adapters for the
Cisco B-Series Blade Servers.

Cisco UCS C-Series Rack-Mount Servers: (Extended Memory

Technology)

Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) with Cisco UCS C-Series Rack-
Mount Servers. These servers:
• Extend Unified Computing innovations and benefits to rack-mount servers
• Offer a built-in future migration path to unified computing
• Increase customer choice with unique benefits in a familiar rack-mount
package
Each product in the series is designed to address varying workload
challenges through a balance of processing, memory, I/O, and internal
storage resources. The series includes the following models:
• The Cisco UCS C460 M1 is a 4-socket, 4 rack unit (RU) rack-mount
server for compute-intensive, enterprise-critical stand-alone applications
and virtualized workloads.
• The Cisco UCS C250 M1 and Cisco UCS C250 M2 are 2-socket, 2 rack
unit (RU) servers with Cisco Extended Memory Technology that increase
performance and capacity for demanding virtualization and large dataset
workloads.
• The Cisco UCS C210 M1 and Cisco UCS C210 M2 are general purpose,
2-socket, 2 RU servers. With up to 16 internal disk drives for up to 8
terabytes (TB) of storage, they balance performance, density, and efficiency
for workloads requiring economical, high-capacity, reliable, internal storage.
• The Cisco UCS C200 M1 and Cisco UCS C200 M2 are 2-socket, 1 RU
servers that balance simplicity, performance, and density for production-
level virtualization, web infrastructure, and other mainstream data center
workloads.
Compare network adapter cards for the Cisco UCS C-Series Rack-Mount
Servers.

Cisco UCS C-Series Network Adapters

The Cisco UCS C-Series network adapters support the C-Series'

incremental deployment model while providing options for I/O consolidation
and virtualization support.
Choose the technology most appropriate for your data center and
applications from the following four types of adapters:
• 1Gb and 10Gb network interface cards
• 4Gb host bus adapters
• Converged network adapters
• Virtual interface card
•
Cisco UCS Manager:

Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) Manager provides unified,

embedded management of all software and hardware components of the
Cisco UCS. It controls multiple chassis and thousands of virtual machines.
Increase Agility and Reduce Complexity
By promoting better process automation, Cisco UCS Manager delivers
greater agility and scale for server operations, while reducing complexity
and risk. It provides flexible role - and policy-based management, using
service profiles and templates. In addition, it facilitates processes based on
IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) concepts.
Improve Visibility and Control
Focused integration with industry-leading systems management partners
helps you easily adopt Cisco UCS, using existing IT staff skills, tools, and
processes. An extensive XML API exposing 9000 points of integration
facilitates custom development to achieve new levels of system visibility and
control.
Reduced IT Costs
Through its simplified, ecosystem-friendly approach, Cisco UCS Manager
helps reduce management and administration expenses, which are among
the largest costs in most IT budgets.

Advantages:

• Innovative packaging that requires less rack space, power, and cooling
than a standard blade server.

• Designed for tight integration with server virtualization and the network.
a. Cisco Virtual switch (i.e. VN-Link) replaces VMware switch. This links
virtual and physical networking policy and management.
b. Cisco adds extra memory to its server platforms, which enables it to
increase the ratio of virtual servers hosted on each physical server.

• Cisco manages the entire UCS virtual data center with one management
platform. Cisco management can be integrated with other management
platforms from vendors like BMC.

•The overall strength is in integrating and improving both storage and

network I/O. In this regard, Cisco could have a significant performance
advantage in large data center deployments.

Disadvantages:

•Extremely proprietary architecture. Heck, Cisco is implementing its own

version of Ethernet (What is more standard than Ethernet, for heaven's
sake?) to consolidate storage and network I/O. The "real" standards won't
be in place for another year or two.

•This is a brand new arena for Cisco where its market share is 0 percent.
With Dell, HP, and IBM well established in this market, expect enterprise
CIOs to proceed with extreme caution.

•The advantages of this architecture are minimal in a mixed environment.

Today, all enterprises have other servers, and heterogeneous server
support is not a core feature of this announcement.
 • Systems management has always been a Cisco weakness. HP and IBM
are much better positioned here.

The CISCO Unified Computing

System Platform:
1 16 Racks
2 64 Chassis
3 512 Blade Servers (8 blades/chassis)
4 1024 Intel Xeon 5540 Quad Core Processors
5 4096 Cores/ 8192 Logical Cores w/HT
6 24,576 GB (24TB) of Total Memory
7 4GB DDR3 1066MZ Dual Rack Dimms
(48GB/Blade)
8 1024 146GB SAS 10K RPM SFF Hot Plug
HDD
9 512 CNAs
10 32 Nexus 6120 XP Fabric Interconnects
(2/Rack)
11 512 Total Server Uplinks
12 Approximately 40K VMs
(80VMs/Blade/10VMs/Core)