Cisco Live! London opens on January 28th, and I’m starting to get excited. Not so much for the week-long trip to London in the midst of winter, but for getting more exposure to a simple three-letter solution – UCS (Unified Computing Systems).
I’ve been in the storage industry for over a decade and have worked with Cisco on many storage and networking fronts in that time. Things have changed lately. Several months ago, I got introduced to the UCS as a converged server and network solution for our Technical Marketing test lab.
At first encounter, I could tell it was going to be more than your standard blade solution – this is both good and potentially very good. I found the power and flexibility of the UCS Manager approach for controlling the gear very useful for the testing, benchmarking and QA activities we perform on a regular basis against the Nimble Storage iSCSI platform.
The recent UCS experience also coincided with Nimble Storage’s forays into the VDI solution space. Here the combination of the UCS compute/network solution and Nimble Storage’s hybrid (SSD/HDD) storage platform were a great fit. Our initial results of this combination can be reviewed here: http://info.nimblestorage.com/cisco-vmware-nimblestorage-solutions.html
Since getting started last summer with our first UCS B-series chassis and the first two test blades, we have grown the test lab to two full chassis filled with Cisco’s latest gear. Tie that compute and networking horsepower to a couple of Nimble Storage CS400 series arrays and you have some interesting testing grounds for virtualization, application testing, VDI, benchmarking – you name it.
If you’re in London for Cisco Live, please stop by our stand (#E81) – I’ll be sharing a peek at our test lab. We’ll also be gathering ideas for our lab infrastructure for the upcoming year. We are already looking at the C-Series servers, which are a good fit for the lower mid-market or isolated environment focus.
See you at Cisco Live Europe!
Hey Mike,
Don’t forget we’ll be presenting in the Cisco Data Center and Cloud Theater (inside the main Cisco booth) on Tues, Jan 29 at 4:45pm: “Successful VDI Using Pre-validated Reference Architectures”
This session will go into more detail on the VDI reference architecture we published with Cisco UCS and VMware View.
- Tony