Data Center are the hearthbeat of large corporation IT infrastructures. A typical Fortune 500 company runs thousands of applications worldwide, stores petabytes (1015) of data, and has multiple data centers along with a disaster recovery plan in place. However, this huge-scale infrastructure often comes at a huge cost! Data centers require expensive real estate, they use a lot  Full Article…

First servers in Data Centers where the stand-alone servers with limited computing, storage, power… Many times they had proprietary form factor. To overcome scalability and power limitations there are two approaches: Scale UP – Scale-up, aka scale vertically, is a term used to indicate a scaling strategy based on increasing the computing power of a single server  Full Article…

Modern processors or CPUs (Central Processing Units) are built using the latest silicon technology and pack millions of transistors and megabytes of memory on a single die (blocks of semiconducting material that contains a processor). Multiple dies are fabricated together in a silicon wafer; each die is cut out individually, tested, and assembled in a ceramic package. This  Full Article…

When considering server memory requirements, the goal is to have enough physical memory compared to active virtual memory, so that memory pagination can be avoided. Virtual memory is paged to disk, and this is a slow process. If intense pagination occurs, significant performance degradation is unavoidable. Memory also depends on the number and speed of processors. A server with more  Full Article…

The terms Unified Fabric or I/O consolidation are synonymous and refer to the ability of a network (both switches and host adapters) to use the same physical infrastructure to carry different types of traffic that typically have different traffic characteristics and handling requirements. From the network side, this equates in having to install and operate a single network instead  Full Article…

VMware® ESX®/vSphere®, Linux® XEN®, and Microsoft® Hyper-V® are well-known virtualization solutions that enable multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) on a single server through the coordination of a hypervisor. A VM is an instantiation of a logical server that behaves as a standalone server, but it shares the hardware and network resources with the other VMs. The hypervisor implements VM to VM communication  Full Article…

VN-Link vs VN-Tag VNTag is needed to augment the forwarding capability of an Ethernet switch and make it capable to operate in a virtualized environment. Classical Ethernet switches do not support the forwarding of frames where the source and destination MAC address are on the same port and therefore do not support forwarding frames between two VMs connected on  Full Article…

Historically, server I/O connectivity to storage, local area networks, and other servers have been accommodated by hardware and software specifically designed and dedicated to the application, each with different traffic characteristics and handling requirements. Server access to storage in enterprises has been largely satisfied by Storage Area Networks (SAN) based on Fibre Channel. Server access to networking devices is almost  Full Article…

Welcome to the world of Network Virtualization… In the old world of physical servers, we have heard about NICs and HBAs. NIC is also called the Network Adapter. Step into the new world of server virtualization, we see a lot of new acronyms describing how the physical servers and virtual machines talk between themselves and  Full Article…

The Cisco® Unified Computing System (UCS) is a data center server architecture that unifies network virtualization, storage virtualization, and server virtualization, within open industry standard technologies and with the network as the platform. UCS Manager The Cisco® UCS Manager (UCSM) software integrates the components of a Cisco® Unified Computing System into a single, seamless entity. It manages all the server  Full Article…