Cisco’s Project California: Blade Servers to go after mass markets in the Clouds
By Tarry Singh at 3 March, 2009, 11:46 am
The overall Cisco scheme is that the virtualised network is the platform. A Cisco unified fabric switch, like the Nexus 5000, will be Shelob, the giant spider in Cisco’s ‘one network to bind them’ concept, sitting at the centre of a web of interconnections. Cisco blade servers running virtual machines - VMware ones for now and Hyper-V ones tomorrow - will link via 10Gig Ethernet to this switch and talk through it to storage, both block and file, and to the outside world. LAN, WAN and cloud.
The likelihood is that storage arrays will be linked to the Nexus in this scheme by Ethernet and not Fibre Channel. MDS9000 Fibre Channel fabric switches won’t appear in this setup because including Fibre Channel will be the very antithesis of a unified fabric. We can infer then that storage arrays will link to the Nexus by Ethernet only.
This is okay for file access as both NFS and CIFS work that way. But block access means either iSCSI or Fibre Channel over Ethernet. Like many others, Cisco has been pushing Fibre
Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) as the enterprise block access method with iSCSI as the SME, non-data centre complement to this.
Related posts:
- Cisco and Dell team up for Data Center deal! Announced at the Cisco Networkers 2009 conference in Barcelona,...
- Cisco dishes out Rack mountable servers with extensive memory UCS C 250M1 It’s got Slashdotted as well. Cisco VP of Marketing...
- Blade Network Technologies unveils Cloud Ready Network products ready for mass virtualization! I think I should soon get a job as...
- Blade Platforms ready for Network Convergence in NGDC, says Blade.org Cisco knows very well that the next rush into the...
- Microsoft, Intel to back Cisco’s California launch; IBM and HP work their own strategy IBM is uniting with Juniper for Project Stratus; and...
- Emulex plans: Adapters will be FCoE and Encrypted! Emulex has announced a second generation Ethernet Fibre Channel...
- Cisco UCS and VMware vSwitch design for vSphere: Another great sample design! Brad’s done it again! Take a look. What I...
- Cisco’s California Project: Redhat more important than VMware for its UCS strategy! This is what I conclude from Matt’s post, although...
Trackbacks & Pingbacks