Cisco's Unified Computing Cuts Costs and Power

Cisco is increasing the efficiency of the data center with its new technology called Unified Computing. Acknowledging that virtualization is here to stay, Cisco is embracing as much virtualization as possible to improve performance and reduce costs. As a result of the synergies involved, power consumption goes down as well.

If Unified Computing has a familiar ring to it, you may be thinking of Unified Communications. UC is an approach to integrate all forms of business communications, such as landline phone, cellular telephone, email, FAX, voice mail and instant messaging. The idea is these traditionally separate communication systems can be combined or unified through a common infrastructure. A simple example is the FAX and Voicemail to Email capability of Kall8 toll free services. Implemented throughout a company, Unified Communications can offer an efficiency improvement that results in faster response and higher productivity.

Unified Computing is also a business oriented approach that is designed to offer efficiency improvements by integrating formerly separate technologies. Cisco's Unified Computing System has at its core a new UCS Blade Server with blades based on an upgrade to the Intel Xenon processors called Nehalem which offer a 30% power reduction for the same performance. The blades have extended memory to support more virtual machines per server.

For networking, Cisco has settled on 10 Gbps Ethernet for everything, including storage area networking that has traditionally had its own Fiber Channel networking. This commonality simplifies cabling and switching, and decreases power and cooling requirements according to Cisco. They have provided the capability to connect to other networks such as Fiber Channel and Infiniband to support existing equipment installations.

So how much savings can be realized by moving to a new consolidated architecture with software tools designed to maximize the advantages of virtualization? Cisco says up to 20% CAPEX (capital expenditures) and 30% OPEX (operational expenditures) can be expected. That's pretty significant in these days of squeezed corporate profit margins. If you are interested in exploring new IT approaches or upgrades to your systems, you'll find Value Added Resellers serving your area through the VAR Network.

The final piece in the puzzle of higher performance for the data center is WAN bandwidth. Traditionally, prices have been high and bandwidth limited. But new offerings, especially in the area of Metro Ethernet Services, are opening the door to WAN connections that can transparently keep up with the bandwidth of the internal network fabric.

Cisco Steps In Front Of The Video Parade

John Naisbitt, author of the future-looking book Megatrends, is quoted as saying, "Leadership involves finding a parade and getting in front of it." Cisco has apparently decided that parade is consumer generated video and they're jumping in front of it by acquiring the producer of the most popular and innovative camcorder line, Flip Video. What do you suppose they have in mind?

To get a bead on Cisco's thinking, we first need to take a look at the video camera that has taken the camcorder market by storm. The original Flip Video camcorder was innovative in the same sense as Apple's iPod. There were music players before the iPod and camcorders long before the Flip. But Pure Digital created a product for capturing video that mirrors the clever design that Apple applied to the iPod. Both products are pocket-size, offer high quality performance, are trivially easy to use, easily connect to personal computers, and have internal power sources compatible with their expected usage.

The Flip product line now includes the Flip Video, Flip Ultra, Flip Mino and FlipMinoHD. Each has a form factor similar to the new slim touchscreen cell phones. Being small and lightweight, they slip easily into a pocket or bag for use on impulse. There's no messing with tapes or discs. These cameras have solid state memory ranging from 1 to 4 GB. There's also no motor driven telephoto lenses or command center worth of controls to make the camera big and chunky. In fact, the Mino series measures just 0.63 in. thick by 1.97 in wide by 3.94 in long.

The Flip Mino is simplicity in itself. The front of the camera has a designable case, such as the MegaTrunks Elephant Camera. All you see is a graphic and a fixed focused lens on front. The back sports a 1.5 in. TFT display and a set of touch sensitive capacitive buttons to record and play your videos. There's also a speaker and microphone to capture audio along with the video. Charge up the lithium Ion battery and you're good for 60 minutes of VGA recording. When you want to move your video to a Mac or PC for editing or uploading to YouTube, just flip out the USB connector and plug it in to your computer. The FlipMinoHD is a very similar device, but offers HD recording at a resolution of 1280 x720 pixels.

So how does Cisco fit into this picture, or perhaps video as it were? Cisco is building a portfolio of consumer products and pursuing a strategy known as "visual networking." They've got the resources to build-out this product line, perhaps adding wireless access for instant capture and upload. As computing and storage move more and more into the cloud, a personal video system might even be able to download as well as upload video content. Multimedia messaging may soon be as pervasive as text messaging is today.

If you think that sounds like an intrusion into the space now occupied by cell phones, you're right. One thing the wireless carriers are onto is that consumers can't get enough of personal video. The wireline broadband providers are feeling the bandwidth pinch even now and wireless will go the same way as multimedia phones become more pervasive and wireless data plans become more affordable.

In the meantime, Cisco must be clucking to itself as it eyes the booming market for devices such as the Flip Video camcorders and the networking life support resources such as routers and switches and make "visual networking" and all other computer networking possible.

New Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Eyes SaaS and Video

Cisco Systems, Inc. is upping the ante on data center bandwidth with its new Nexus 7000 series of switching products due to ship later this year. The new benchmark is 15 Tbps (Terabits per second) in a single chassis. To put that in terms of bandwidths we experience every day, that's 15,000 Gbps. At that speed, you could suck the Internet dry in seconds. Well, at least the searchable databases you can access today. Don't get too overwhelmed by this benchmark, though. It's likely to become the rule rather than the exception before too long.

What's with the need for speed? The primary driver is the move from static data to video as a way to communicate. Long distance telephone service, the reason nationwide networks were developed in the first place, gets lost in the packet shuffle on high speed IP networks. Not that voice services don't need care and feeding to maintain their integrity on converged networks. It's just that a 64 Kbps VoIP stream is truly nothing compared with the flood of packets needed to support high definition video feeds.

Standard and high definition video, including telepresence, video conferencing, Web site video feeds, and real time creative content represents a shift in media. It's the same type of shift that took us from newspapers to radio to television. Video won't replace text, graphics and audio feeds. It will add to them. You can see this on many commercial Web sites now. You can either read a story or have the option to see a video interview.

Another trend driving data center bandwidth is SaaS or Software as a Service. SaaS replaces the model of buying and locally hosting software packages by instead accessing applications via the Web as needed. The advantage of this approach is that the IT department isn't constantly scrambling to install, deploy and maintain a myriad of software packages. The service provider takes care of all that. Server capacity requirements are traded off for bandwidth demands that add to network load. This is especially true for WAN bandwidth, the pipe that connects a company to the outside world. That Wide Area Network needs expanded capacity to handle the video streams and application access.

Cisco's Nexus 700 is designed to support up to 512 10 Gbps Ethernet connections, with future delivery of 40 and 100 Gbps Ethernet. As LANs speed up to 10 Gbps and higher speeds locally, nationwide and regional carriers are expanding their core networks toward 100 Gbps and greater fiber optic bandwidths.

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Unified Communications Merges Everything

Convergence is a trend in enterprise networks, often focused on migrating telephony to the corporate LAN using VoIP. But the ultimate goal of unified communications involves integrating all electronic communications. That encompasses wired telephony, voice messaging, video conferencing, data networking, network security, VPN and wireless access.

Interestingly, Cisco already has a platform that will do all of this and more for the smaller business. It's the Cisco Unified Communications 500 Series. The basic solution includes telephony support for 8 IP phones, 4 FXS analog phones and 4 FXO analog trunk lines, plus support for SIP trunking. It has integrated voicemail and an auto-attendant, making it a full-featured small office PBX phone system.

So far this sounds like a typical small office IP PBX system. But the 500 series platform goes further. The antenna implies wireless communications. In this case it's an 802.11b/g wireless access point that supports wireless LAN IP phones as well as wireless data devices.

Connection to the WAN or Wide Area Network gives you broadband Internet access with full security via a Cisco IOS Firewall that supports point to point VPNs. Use these Virtual Private Network connections to include home workers or employees operating remotely. You can also easily expand LAN access inside the office by adding a Cisco Catalyst Express 520 Switch with 8 additional ports of 10/100 Mbps PoE (Power over Ethernet). This switch comes configured to work immediately with the 500 series.

With this system, called the Cisco Smart Business Communications System, you have up to 16 computer workstations, IP security cameras, or IP phone sets, a data/voice wireless access point, secure WAN (broadband Internet) access, secure VPN communications to remote locations, an in-house telephone system that connects to the PSTN and supports FAX machines and other analog devices, plus simplified set-up and management built-in. It's a single box that supports the complete small office communications needs.