Advantages of Cisco Unified Computing System in Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation Environments

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Clifton Hubbard
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1 Advantages of Cisco Unified Computing System in Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation Environments

The Defense Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation Environment The Department of Defense (DoD) and its industry and academia partners operate extensive research, development, test, and

This same RDT&E infrastructure is also frequently used to provide support of fielded systems.

2 The Defense Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation Environment The Department of Defense (DoD) and its industry and academia partners operate extensive research, development, test, and evaluation (RDT&E) environments to support development and test of systems before they are delivered to operational forces. This same RDT&E infrastructure is also frequently used to provide support of fielded systems. As systems become increasingly more complex, connected, and interdependent, effective RDT&E requires large-scale, virtually integrated infrastructure to support research, development, engineering, test, evaluation, and support activities that are required to provide sound systems engineering. The DoD RDT&E infrastructure can become very highly specialized due to system or platform unique attributes and numerous configurations of fielded systems that must be considered in development, test, and support efforts. It is highly desirable to utilize an adaptable, reconfigurable, and flexible RDT&E infrastructure to provide significantly greater capability more quickly and at reduced cost. It is also very desirable to make sure that this infrastructure provides high reliability and repeatability, all of which reduces cost, schedule, and performance risk for acquisition organizations and supports optimal system performance in the field to allow our forces to fight and win. Cisco UCS is a massively scalable, distributed, unified system with a single point of connectivity and management. Page 2 of 9

3 Challenges in RDT&E Environments RDT&E environments require agile and flexible infrastructure to support changing needs. The test infrastructure should support changes easily and allow for scalability and agility. It should also allow visibility into the environment and easy management of multiple projects such that the focus/configuration can be changed with minimal downtime. In an IT-intensive research facility, the challenges can be broken into three main categories: Manual assembly: To support every step from server refresh to cloud computing, engineers are typically burdened with the time-consuming, error-prone, manual assembly of servers, storage, and networking components into infrastructure that supports different evaluations and tests. Complex and siloed infrastructure: The infrastructure that results from manual assembly of components is complex and inflexible and does not adapt dynamically to the changing demands and requirements of an RDT&E environment. Frequently, individual, independent standalone infrastructures are developed for various profiles to make sure of availability to support competing activities and avoid the downtime required for reconfiguration for a new or different task. Fragmented management: Traditional systems are configured using a collection of individual management tools on discrete management servers that together do not provide an automated, endto- end way to give visibility into a larger infrastructure environment. This traditional arrangement also requires highly skilled personnel to manage each stovepiped RDT&E infrastructure environment. Introducing Cisco Unified Data Center Today s data centers are migrating from the distributed client-server model of the past toward the more virtualized model of the future. This steady migration is fueled by the need to conserve space and energy, as well as a desire to overcome the myriad problems that arise from supporting a heterogeneous data center environment, such as complexity, disjointed domains, cabling, inefficiency, and cooling. The first major breakthrough in the migration was the development of enterprise-class hypervisors for x86 systems and the common Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems. These hypervisors and their associated virtual servers delivered the first building block of a virtualized data center: a server abstraction that was not bound to a physical hardware element. With virtual machines, users can now define a server in software and deploy it anywhere in the data center without altering any of the underlying hardware. However, although virtual server hosts and their associated virtual machines were a major breakthrough and extremely valuable in their own right, the data center still remained a world of islands, with separate network, storage, and server technology and administration stacks. To meet this challenge, Cisco introduced the Unified Data Center platform. When designing its Unified Data Center platform, Cisco did not assess technologies, processes, and people in isolation. Instead, the company developed a unified platform composed of three integrated, leading data center technologies: Cisco Unified Fabric, Unified Computing, and Unified Management. The result of using these integrated technologies was a radically simplified architecture when compared with traditional systems. For instance, Cisco Unified Fabric significantly simplifies the data center network by using Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) to converge what previously were siloed LANs and SANs in traditional environments onto a single network. In contrast to having multiple operating environments in a traditional data center network, this approach provides a single operating system that runs across every element of the data center Page 3 of 9

4 network. Cisco Unified Management helps ensure that every aspect of a server s personality, configuration, and connectivity can be manipulated through software, rather than through manual assembly of network interfaces, switches, and cables. This capability simplifies deployment and changes to infrastructure and automates policy-based dynamic network provisioning to securely enable new services and resources with the right network connectivity and bandwidth. Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS ) integrates server, networking, and I/O resources into a single system. It acts as a single point of management, allowing the system to scale without complexity, and integrates all the system s resources into an agile, flexible resource pool. The benefits of Cisco Unified Data Center are: Server consolidation: Servers used to be designed as discrete resources with a certain number of I/O and storage access ports and a fixed amount of memory. Inadequate memory for large applications and databases meant that memory became exhausted long before CPU resources did, requiring the purchase of additional servers. Fixed ports often reached full utilization prior to other server elements, necessitating new server purchases. Each additional server came with additional costs, including software, hardware service contracts, network I/0, power and cooling, and data center space. In contrast, because Cisco UCS integrates server, networking, and storage access resources, it is inherently designed to share and scale with respect to resources. Network and storage convergence: The process of network consolidation enables extensive cost reductions. In a traditional environment, a typical enterprise server might have six to eight network connections extending from it, including data and storage connections as well as those dedicated to management or backup. Each of these connections, however, adds incremental costs such as a PCI card and cabling needed for each interface and each cable connecting to a switch port. The Unified Fabric allows IT to consolidate the two storage networks Ethernet and Fibre Channel into a single physical infrastructure. This allows organizations to collapse the number of connections and switches required. Server virtualization: When you evaluate the TCO of servers in a virtualized environment, your requirements are far different than they were for traditional servers. Instead of viewing an individual server as a discrete entity, you evaluate how well that server can function as part of a high-performance resource pool. Server virtualization will be successful only if the servers can support the large applications common in these environments and consistently meet performance and reliability service-level agreements (SLAs). In addition, the servers must excel in their ability to respond to change quickly and effectively. Cisco UCS is optimized for virtualization through tremendous computing power, memory, networking resources, and I/O bandwidth into a given space while boosting performance of virtualized environments. Introducing Cisco UCS Page 4 of 9

cloud-computing environments. A unified I/O infrastructure uses a high-bandwidth, low-latency unified fabric to support networking, storage I/O, and management traffic.

5 The Cisco Unified Computing System is the industry s first unified data center platform. The system s configuration is entirely programmable using unified, model-based management to simplify and accelerate deployment of applications and services running in bare-metal, virtualized, and cloud-computing environments. A unified I/O infrastructure uses a high-bandwidth, low-latency unified fabric to support networking, storage I/O, and management traffic. The Cisco Fabric Extender (FEX) technology directly connects the fabric to servers and virtual machines for increased performance, security, and manageability. FEX includes technologies that enable fabric extensibility with simplified management, enabling the switching access layer to extend and expand all the way to the server hypervisor as the customer s business grows. Just as FEX technology extends the fabric, the service profile is an extension of the virtual machine abstraction applied to physical servers. These service profiles can be dynamically created and associated with any physical server in the system within minutes rather than hours or days. The association of service profiles with physical servers is performed as a simple, single operation. Service profile templates help enable large-scale operations in which many servers are provisioned as easily as a single server. They enable migration of identities between servers in the environment without requiring any physical configuration changes and facilitate rapid bare-metal provisioning of replacements for failed servers. (See Figure 1.) Figure 1. Cisco Unified Computing System Components Page 5 of 9

6 Through the following advantages, Cisco UCS helps transform the RDT&E work environment by making it easier to scale, change, and test configurations and applications: Agility and scalability: Intelligent infrastructure, through service profiles referenced earlier, results in exceptional agility because any resource can be used for any purpose based on policies and business needs. Repetitive tasks are automated, increasing resource utilization by speeding up the configuration of servers. Servers no longer have to be dedicated to a single specific function because server and adapter firmware levels can be adjusted dynamically to make any server available to run any workload in minutes, rather than the hours or days needed using traditional processes. At one moment a Cisco UCS server can propel a bare-metal database instance, and later the same server can be repurposed and joined into a pool of servers supporting a cloud-computing environment. Ideal for cloud-computing environments, Cisco UCS can support service catalogs with bare-metal or virtual machines. Cisco UCS is designed with a unified fabric that condenses three network types IP, storage, and management into one. This wire-once philosophy means that the system is wired only once, when it is installed, with bandwidth allocations and I/O configurations managed dynamically through the system s embedded management features. Because all servers are physically wired with the same 10 Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) network, they all can host the same workloads simply by changing configurations through software. This zero-touch approach increases business agility because connectivity is uniform, and therefore hardware configurations no longer limit the applications that can be supported. This can help in an RDT&E environment, where priorities are always changing, determined by the priorities of the warfighter. Given the environment s reflection to support changing mission needs in a timely manner, the tasks and objectives in an RDT&E environment are constantly changing, and multiple projects or multiple phases of a single project need to be supported. Cisco UCS scalability allows additional servers (and testing) to be added to the infrastructure, and the agility allows changes to be made with minimal downtime. For example, Cisco UCS allows a single laboratory infrastructure to be configured for a system integration test of a developmental system in the morning and then rapidly reconfigured to support troubleshooting support for deployed systems in the afternoon. The mission needs can be accomplished more quickly, and changes can be adapted to easily. Automated configuration: Cisco UCS is intelligent infrastructure in which server identity, personality, and I/O connectivity are abstracted from the hardware and can be applied on demand, allowing any workload to run on any server at a moment s notice. Cisco UCS is designed such that every aspect of a server s configuration, from firmware revisions and BIOS settings to network profiles, can be assigned through the system s open, documented, standards-based XML API. This API can be accessed through the Cisco UCS Manager GUI, through a comprehensive ecosystem of third-party management and orchestration tools, or directly through custom software. Models of desired server and I/O configurations can be created in the form of Cisco service profiles. When a service profile is associated with a physical server, its entire configuration is provisioned automatically, from firmware revisions to network and I/O connectivity. Service profiles can be created for specific server hardware, essentially preconfiguring them, and the system discovers the servers and configures them automatically. Cisco service profile templates describe policies for creating service profiles, empowering evaluation engineers to create 100 server configurations as easily as they create one. This approach contrasts significantly with the manual approach of configuring each component with a separate element manager or the use of incomplete management tools that handle some, but not all, server configuration steps. Page 6 of 9

7 Automated configurations are important in an RDT&E environment, where changes are made to reflect changing mission needs. Servers and network configurations are constructed and deconstructed for different projects and testing needs. Service profiles make this process of changing configurations and constructing and deconstructing services on hardware platforms faster and easier. Multiple different applications can be deployed at a faster rate through the automated configurations, making the testing cycles faster. Hence, the agility and urgency of the mission can be responded to more quickly, without requiring more cycles from the engineers. Central management: Cisco UCS uses integrated, model-based management to provision servers automatically. Simply by associating a model with system resources, researchers can consistently align policy, server personality, and workloads. The results are increased availability and reduced risk of failures due to inconsistent configurations. Cisco UCS Manager recognizes components as they are connected to the system and incorporates them into an abstract model that includes every available resource. In contrast to traditional systems, in which manual tracking of system resources is required, Cisco UCS Manager maintains its inventory automatically and accurately. Through Cisco UCS Manager s role- and policy-based management, engineers can define policies that dictate how to configure specific server types. These policies can be created once but used repeatedly to deploy servers. Cisco UCS Manager provides a single point of management for the entire system, and it also aggregates element management and monitoring, allowing traditional enterprise management tools to obtain status information about every system component with only a single query, further increasing operational scale. Through its unified, embedded, policy-based, and ecosystem-friendly approach, Cisco UCS Manager helps reduce management and administration expenses, which are among the largest items in most IT budgets. The Cisco UCS Manager can manage up to 160 servers and thousands of Cisco UCS components in multiple chassis. Having a single point of management is particularly important in the RDT&E environment because it provides visibility and allows automation and scalability to happen from a single point. This reduces the management time, which is critical in an environment where the testing needs or test configurations are constantly changing. Instead of touching multiple different sets of equipment to reconfigure for a new test, researchers can make changes in software from a single management plane. Management from a single plane will also greatly enhance configuration management necessary to make sure test environments are configured accurately to make sure of repeatability. Page 7 of 9

8 Reduced infrastructure: Cisco unified fabric condenses three network types IP, storage, and management into one. The use of a single network technology reduces rack-level infrastructure costs by up to two-thirds by eliminating discrete Fibre Channel, interprocess communication, and management networks. In Cisco UCS, a single pair of fabric extenders brings the management and data plane of the fabric interconnects to the blade chassis or server rack, condensing up to three network layers into one. The entire system becomes a distributed, virtual blade chassis that incorporates a full range of blade and rack server products able to handle any workload. The integrated system efficiently and consistently manages all network traffic at a single point. Cisco FEX technology decouples complexity from capacity, enabling Cisco UCS to scale gracefully and at lower costs, provided the reduced infrastructure. Instead of expanding the system by adding layers of switching in racks, blade servers, and hypervisors, Cisco UCS uses low-cost, low-energy-consuming FEX technology to connect the data and management planes directly to blade and rack servers. Cisco fabric extenders bring up to 160 Gbps of network, storage, and management bandwidth to each chassis and multiple 10-Gbps connections to each rack-mount server. This significant reduction in components enables a lower-cost, more graceful scaling model in which the per-server infrastructure cost, including the cost of blade chassis and switching, is as little as half that of some of our competitors. This is good for an RDT&E environment because reduced infrastructure results in cost savings in several ways. There is lower space consumption, freeing up data center space for other mission needs. There are also fewer management touchpoints, which reduces complexity on behalf of administrators. Finally, with less infrastructure, there is a lower electric bill for both power and cooling. For power, a smaller footprint enables more effective cooling scenarios, further reducing costs. In fact, Cisco UCS requires 37 percent less space and supports 60 percent more servers per RU, resulting in a 33 percent cost savings compared to competitors. An RDT&E department can now consume less budget and floor and rack space than usual, while providing the same results. Page 8 of 9

9 Why Cisco? Cisco Unified Computing System demonstrates that Cisco innovates in ways that traditional vendors with traditional product lines cannot. The market has demonstrated the value of Cisco UCS by making Cisco one of the top three x86-architecture blade server vendors in less than two years since the first product shipment. In fact, Cisco s blade servers currently hold the largest market share of any vendor in the Americas and the second largest in the world. The Cisco Unified Computing System continues Cisco s long history of innovation in delivering integrated systems for improved business results based on industry standards and using the network as the platform. Cisco Unified Data Center is the optimum platform for future readiness. Open standards and APIs allow for integration and management of hardware and software solutions from Cisco s ecosystem partners, providing flexibility to the data center architecture. The platform enables cloud computing and cloud-based solutions for public, private, and hybrid clouds from partners delivering Cisco Powered cloud services. The platform also enables Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), which is a holistic architecture with centralized automation and policy-driven application profiles. With the migration to a Cisco Unified Data Center, the RDT&E environment is ready for future mission needs. References 1. cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/servers-unified-computing/ucs-manager/at_a_glance_c pdf 2. cisco.com/c/en/us/products/servers-unified-computing/ucs-manager/index.html 3. cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/servers-unified-computing/ucs-b230-m2-blade-server/at_a_glance_ c pdf 4. cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/solutions/collateral/borderless-networks/advanced-services/le_32302_sb_itagility.pdf 5. cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/data-center-virtualization/architecture.html 6. cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/data-center-virtualization/data-center-virtualization/whitepaper_c html 7. cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/servers-unified-computing/ucs-manager/white_paper_c html Americas Headquarters Cisco Systems, Inc. San Jose, CA Asia Pacific Headquarters Cisco Systems (USA) Pte. Ltd. Singapore Europe Headquarters Cisco Systems International BV Amsterdam, The Netherlands Cisco has more than 200 offices worldwide. Addresses, phone numbers, and fax numbers are listed on the Cisco Website at Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. To view a list of Cisco trademarks, go to this URL: Third party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. (1110R)

IT Agility Delivered: Cisco Unified Computing System

Solution Brief IT Agility Delivered: Cisco Unified Computing System 2011 2012 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public information. Page 1 IT Agility Delivered: Cisco