Cisco UCS Differentiators |
Posted: November 14, 2017 |
Cisco’s Unified Compute System is revolutionizing the way servers are managed in data-center. Following are the unique differentiators of UCS and UCS Manager: 1. Embedded Management —In Cisco UCS, the servers are managed by the embedded firmware in the Fabric Interconnects, eliminating need for any external physical or virtual devices to manage the servers. 2. Unified Fabric —In UCS, from blade server chassis or rack servers to FI, there is a single Ethernet cable used for LAN, SAN and management traffic. This converged I/O results in reduced cables, SFPs and adapters – reducing capital and operational expenses of overall solution. 3. Auto Discovery —By simply inserting the blade server in the chassis or connecting rack server to the fabric interconnect, discovery and inventory of compute resource occurs automatically without any management intervention. The combination of unified fabric and auto-discovery enables the wire-once architecture of UCS, where compute capability of UCS can be extended easily while keeping the existing external connectivity to LAN, SAN and management networks. 4. Policy Based Resource Classification —Once a compute resource is discovered by UCS Manager, it can be automatically classified to a given resource pool based on policies defined. This capability is useful in multi-tenant cloud computing. This CVD showcases the policy based resource classification of UCS Manager. 5. Combined Rack and Blade Server Management —UCS Manager can manage B-Series blade servers and C-Series rack server under the same UCS domain. This feature, along with stateless computing makes compute resources truly hardware form factor agnostic. 6. Model based Management Architecture —UCS Manager Architecture and management database is model based and data driven. An open XML API is provided to operate on the management model. This enables easy and scalable integration of UCS Manager with other management systems. 7. Policies, Pools, Templates —The management approach in UCS Manager is based on defining policies, pools and templates, instead of cluttered configuration, which enables a simple, loosely coupled, data driven approach in managing compute, network and storage resources. 8. Loose Referential Integrity —In UCS Manager, a service profile, port profile or policies can refer to other policies or logical resources with loose referential integrity. A referred policy cannot exist at the time of authoring the referring policy or a referred policy can be deleted even though other policies are referring to it. This provides different subject matter experts to work independently from each-other. This provides great flexibility where different experts from different domains, such as network, storage, security, server and virtualization work together to accomplish a complex task. 9. Policy Resolution —In UCS Manager, a tree structure of organizational unit hierarchy can be created that mimics the real life tenants and/or organization relationships. Various policies, pools and templates can be defined at different levels of organization hierarchy. A policy referring to another policy by name is resolved in the organization hierarchy with closest policy match. If no policy with specific name is found in the hierarchy of the root organization, then special policy named “default” is searched. This policy resolution practice enables automation friendly management APIs and provides great flexibility to owners of different organizations. 10. Service Profiles and Stateless Computing —a service profile is a logical representation of a server, carrying its various identities and policies. This logical server can be assigned to any physical compute resource as far as it meets the resource requirements. Stateless computing enables procurement of a server within minutes, which used to take days in legacy server management systems. 11. Built-in Multi-Tenancy Support —The combination of policies, pools and templates, loose referential integrity, policy resolution in organization hierarchy and a service profiles based approach to compute resources makes UCS Manager inherently friendly to multi-tenant environment typically observed in private and public clouds. 12. Extended Memory — the enterprise-class Cisco UCS B200 M4 blade server extends the capabilities of Cisco’s Unified Computing System portfolio in a half-width blade form factor. The Cisco UCS B200 M4 harnesses the power of the latest Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 v4 Series processor family CPUs with up to 1536 GB of RAM (using 64 GB DIMMs) – allowing huge VM to physical server ratio required in many deployments, or allowing large memory operations required by certain architectures like Big-Data. 13. Virtualization Aware Network —VM-FEX technology makes the access network layer aware about host virtualization. This prevents domain pollution of compute and network domains with virtualization when virtual network is managed by port-profiles defined by the network administrators’ team. VM-FEX also off-loads hypervisor CPU by performing switching in the hardware, thus allowing hypervisor CPU to do more virtualization related tasks. VM-FEX technology is well integrated with VMware vCenter, Linux KVM and Hyper-V SR-IOV to simplify cloud management. 14. Simplified QoS —Even though Fiber Channel and Ethernet are converged in UCS fabric, built-in support for QoS and lossless Ethernet makes it seamless. Network Quality of Service (QoS) is simplified in UCS Manager by representing all system classes in one GUI panel.
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