VMworld 2009, held in San Francisco Aug. 31 through Sept. 3, was noteworthy only for its major product announcements and large attendance-nearly 13,000-but it also sported the biggest deployment thus far of Cisco Systems' new Unified Computing System.
Cisco's UCS, launched last March 16, consists of a new data center architecture, a new server and a new set of management software and services based on Intel's powerful quad-core Nehalem Xeon processors. Cisco partners that include EMC and NetApp [storage], BMC [management software], VMware Microsoft [virtualization software layers], and Accenture [product configurations] are pitching in on the deployments, which Cisco says are gaining traction.
Cisco's VMworld Data Center was used to run 23 different labs, including 11 self-paced labs. More than over 4,000 users were trained in these labs over the four days of the conference. The architecture was designed, architected and implemented in a record two months and was comprised of 16 Unified Computing Systems, supporting 1,024 processors. It was provisioned and up and running less than 30 days from the first customer shipment to support the big event. The architecture featured Cisco's Data Center 3.0 hardware, including the Nexus and MDS switches.
Here is a quick-click tour through the huge but temporary data center, which is larger and more powerful than most of the world's permanent data centers.
of
It would have been hard to miss the portable data center at VMworld, because it was located at the entrance to Moscone Center North. (eWEEK Photo by Chris Preimesberger)
Overview
Power Savings
The display in front of the UCS system explains that a comparable Tier III physical data center would use 23,329 kilowatts of electricity, while the corresponding virtualized data center would draw only about 528 kilowatts.(eWEEK Photo by Chris Preimesberger)
Architecture Supporting Instructor Led Labs
Storage
NetApp (left) and EMC-two companies that are bitter rivals in the marketplace-allow their arrays to sit side-by-side in the Cisco UCS configuration.(eWEEK Photo by Chris Preimesberger)
Key Design Components
Key Facts
A Tangle of Cables
Multicolored spaghetti comes to mind when viewing the back of this particular switch.(eWEEK Photo by Chris Preimesberger)
Simplified Cabling
Cisco takes a great deal of pride in its simplified cabling arrangement on its new switches, which are much easier to deal with.(eWEEK Photo by Chris Preimesberger)
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VMworld 2009, held in San Francisco Aug. 31 through Sept. 3, was noteworthy only for its major product announcements and large attendance-nearly 13,000-but it also sported the biggest deployment thus far of Cisco Systems' new Unified Computing System.
Cisco's UCS, launched last March 16, consists of a new data center architecture, a new server and a new set of management software and services based on Intel's powerful quad-core Nehalem Xeon processors. Cisco partners that include EMC and NetApp [storage], BMC [management software], VMware Microsoft [virtualization software layers], and Accenture [product configurations] are pitching in on the deployments, which Cisco says are gaining traction.
Cisco's VMworld Data Center was used to run 23 different labs, including 11 self-paced labs. More than over 4,000 users were trained in these labs over the four days of the conference. The architecture was designed, architected and implemented in a record two months and was comprised of 16 Unified Computing Systems, supporting 1,024 processors. It was provisioned and up and running less than 30 days from the first customer shipment to support the big event. The architecture featured Cisco's Data Center 3.0 hardware, including the Nexus and MDS switches.
Here is a quick-click tour through the huge but temporary data center, which is larger and more powerful than most of the world's permanent data centers.