KUALA LUMPUR, 20 MARCH 2009 – A new data centre architecture called Unified Computing System (UCS) will bring out the full power of virtualisation, according to technology firm Cisco Malaysia.
“UCS will result in a unified architecture tantamount to next generation data centres: data centre 3.0,” said Cisco Malaysia managing director Anne Abraham. “This is a timely launch as according to IDC. 2009 will be a year of growth in this sector, which worldwide is a US$85 billion dollar market.”
“This is an architectural launch, designed to allow the data centre to become an agile information networked environment that allows access to any device in the network,” said Andre Smit, managing director, data centre sales, Cisco Asia Pacific.
Data Centre 3.0 vision
“The UCS approach is a cohesive system that brings together elements under a single management layer to bring the benefits of lower TCO [total cost of ownership], increased business agility and improved energy efficiency,” said Smit.
He said a team of experts across the industry, including Dell, Egenera, HP, Oracle, Sun, Veritas/Symantec, VMware, Xensource and other major partners will be involved in the rollout of this solution in the near future.
“Customers tell us that management complexity is a key issue,” said Pete Nicholls, business development manager, data centre, Cisco Asia Pacific. “So we had to have a cohesive solution with embedded management that allows third party management systems: an open API on a management server, with a unified fabric that strips away extraneous cabling.”
As an example, Nicholls said a large financial company had savings that included 43 per cent on capital expenses, 19 per cent on power and cooling, and 86 per cent on cabling costs. “On average, UCS can save around 20 per cent on capital expenses, and up to 30 per cent on operating costs.”
Red Hat: partner-driven solution
“UCS is a partner-driven integrated approach that would be especially welcome in these economically-stressed times,” said Cisco’s Smit.
For example, Cisco will act as an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) for Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux platform to allow customers to purchase a complete solution from Cisco along with services and support.
“Red Hat and Cisco have long collaborated in the open-source community and today bring joint innovation to customers through the combination of our next-generation enterprise solutions,” said Red Hat chief technology officer and vice president, engineering, Brian Stevens. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization technologies power a wide range of the world's mission-critical, Internet and high-performance computing workloads, as well as the majority of the early cloud environments. Cisco's unified computing vision offers customers a long-term platform for deploying powerful computing infrastructures.”
