Data Center Specialist Certifications

Cisco Data Center Application Services Design Specialist

The Cisco Data Center Application Services Design Specialist certification validates an individual’s presales knowledge of selecting and integrating Cisco Data Center Application Services products to design a highly scalable, efficient, and high performance Data Center Application Services solution based on Cisco’s Data Center Architecture. Cisco Data Center Networking Application Services Design Specialist Professionals understand how to utilize and employ the features and benefits of the Cisco Application Control Engine Services Module and Appliance, the Cisco Global Site Selector and the Cisco Application Network Manager to create a scalable high performance Data Center design.

Prerequisite: Valid CCDA certification, or any CCIE certfication.

Required Cisco Exam: 642–972 DCASD

Cisco Data Center Application Services Support Specialist

The Cisco Data Center Application Services Support Specialist certification validates an individual’s post-sales knowledge of implementing, integrating, troubleshooting, and maintaining Cisco Data Center Application Services products in a highly scalable, efficient, and high-performance Data Center Application Services solution-based on Cisco’s Data Center Architecture.

Prerequisite: Valid CCNA certification, or any CCIE certfication.

Required Cisco Exam: 642–975 DCASI

Cisco Data Center Networking Infrastructure Design Specialist

The Cisco Data Center Networking Infrastructure Design Specialist certification, validates an individual’s knowledge of selecting and integrating Cisco Data Center products to design a highly scalable, efficient, and high performing Data Center networking solution based on Cisco Data Center Architecture.

Prerequisite: Valid CCDA certification, or any CCIE certfication.

Required Cisco Exam: 642–991 DCUFD

Cisco Data Center Networking Infrastructure Support Specialist

The Cisco Data Center Networking Infrastructure Support Specialist validates an individual’s knowledge of installing, configuring, and troubleshooting Cisco Data Center products to maintain a highly scalable, efficient, high performing Data Center Networking environment.

Cisco Data Center Networking Infrastructure Support Specialist professionals understand how to deploy and optimize the features and benefits of the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Switches, Cisco 4948 Switches, and Cisco Catalyst Blade Switches to provide fast and accurate resolution to network installation and customer service issues.

Prerequisite: Valid CCNP certification, or any CCIE certfication.

Required Cisco Exams: 642–973 DCNI or 642–974 DCNIS-2

Cisco Data Center Storage Networking Support Specialist

The Cisco Data Center Storage Networking Support Specialist certification validates an individual’s knowledge of installing, configuring, and troubleshooting Cisco storage products to maintain a highly scalable, efficient, high-performing storage networking environment. Cisco Data Center Storage Networking Support Specialists understand how to deploy and optimize the features and benefits of the Cisco MDS 9000 Series Multilayer Directors and Switches, Cisco MDS 9509 Director Switch, Cisco 9216 Fabric Switch, and Cisco MDS 9120 products to provide fast and accurate resolution to network installation and customer service issues.

Prerequisite: None

Required Cisco Exam: 642–359 ICSNS

Cisco Data Center Unified Computing Design Specialist

The Cisco Data Center Unified Design Computing Design Specialist validates an engineer’s ability to design scalable, reliable, and intelligent Data Center Virtualization solutions based on the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) along with other Cisco Data Center products, server virtualization software and server operating systems.

Prerequisite: Pass the VMware Certified Professional exam (VCP3 or VCP4 from VMware). In addition to the VMware requirement candidates must also meet one of the following criteria:

Option 1: Valid Cisco Certifications in both DCSNS and DCNID

— OR —

Fast Start Option 2: Valid Cisco CCDA certification and passing DCUCD Qualifier Exam 642–978

Required Cisco Exam: 642–993 DCUCD

Cisco Data Center Unified Computing Support Specialist

The Cisco Data Center Unified Computing Support Specialist is designed to test students’ knowledge of the fundamentals of the Cisco UCS and their ability to implement a virtualized Data Center environment. In addition the student also tests on how to implement the Cisco UCS in an enterprise data center routing and switching infrastructure with the next-generation Cisco Nexus product family.

Prerequisite: Pass the VMware Certified Professional exam (VCP3 or VCP4 from VMware). In addition to the VMware requirement candidates must also meet one of the following criteria:

Option 1: Valid Cisco Certifications in both ICSNS and DCNIS

— OR —

Fast Start Option 2: Valid Cisco CCNA certification and passing DCUCI Qualifier Exam 642–979

Required Cisco Exam: 642–993 DCUCI

Cisco Data Center Storage Networking Design Specialist

The Cisco Data Center Storage Networking Design Specialist certification validates an individual’s knowledge of selecting and integrating Cisco storage products to design a highly scalable, efficient, high-performing storage networking solution based on converged architecture. Cisco Data Center Storage Networking Design Specialist professionals understand how to utilize and employ the features and benefits of the Cisco MDS 9000 Series Multilayer Directors and Switches, Cisco MDS 9509 Director Switch, Cisco 9216 Fabric Switch, and Cisco MDS 9120 products to create a high availability storage network design.

Prerequisite: None

Required Cisco Exam: 642–357 DCSNS

Related Courses
Cisco Certifications

I’ve been to Las Vegas before when I attended Cisco Live 2011, but this is my first time attending the Interop IT Expo and Conference. Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas, and Interop — what a combo.

Like the majority of folks attending, as we walk by the slot machines, craps tables, and roulette wheels, I’m looking forward to learning more about emerging IT topics such as cloud computing and virtualization, data center and storage, and wireless and mobility, as well as security and risk management.

With over 100 sessions jam-packed with info from IT experts from across the globe, I am especially impressed with Interop’s list of heavy-hitters for their keynotes. I’m most excited about Padmasree Warrior, Cisco System’s CTO and Senior Vice President of Engineering. I’m a fan. She’s also General Manager of Cisco’s Enterprise Business. In her keynote, she’ll discuss how technologies such as mobility, cloud, and video are transforming IT. I’m sure she’ll be great. Like I said, I’m a fan.

VMware’s CTO and Senior Vice President of Research and Development, Steve Herrod, will also be on hand to discuss the concept of the software-defined data center during his Interop keynote. I’ve heard he’ll explain how IT needs a software-defined data center that’s flexible, efficient, and the peak of automation to be successful in the marketplace.

Avaya’s Marc Randall will discuss application-driven networking. He’ll explain how applications, devices, and networks have seemingly advanced separately since their inception. Current IT trends require a more proactive integration of these technologies that can potentially be met with application driven networks.

Also on the schedule are Google’s Jonathan Rochelle, Dell’s Dario Zamarian, and Rackspace CTO John Engates, as well as Allan Leinwand, who is the CTO of Infrastructure at Zynga, the creator of the Facebook addiction of the moment — Words With Friends. I’m interested to hear what those guys have to say.

Also marked on my Interop calendar is the unveiling of the HP and Dreamworks collaboration, Cloud’s Silver Screen Debut: How HP & DreamWorks Animation Brought Cloud Computing to the Red Carpet.

I’m curious about the downsides to cloud deployment other than the security risks. I hope one session in particular, Building VMware Private Clouds, will hopefully cover how the enterprise can take virtualization to the next level by building cloud networks with VMware’s vCloud Director product, whether they are private, public, and/or hybrid, as well as how to manage ongoing operations.

In Las Vegas, if only for this week of Interop, BYOD still stands for “bring your own device.” There are three sessions addressing this topic: Tablets: Where Do We Go From Here?, Living With (And Prospering From) BYOD, and How BYOD is Driving Change in the Campus Network. Whether it’s supporting these devices and allowing them on your network or learning how to keep them off your network, BYOD has arrived. You might as well be prepared.

One more thing: If your boss cheaped out and told you to read post-show blogs instead of sending you to Las Vegas for Interop, follow my tweets at @GKJohnMarkIvey during the show to keep up with the week’s events. If you’re actually attending Interop, follow my tweets as well (there are three tweetups that I know of), and stop by the Global Knowledge booth to get the last of our Powered Up t-shirts designed by artist Tom Whalen.

The unprecedented growth of data, its increasing importance, and business’ dependence on digital information are leading to larger and more complex information storage environments that are becoming more challenging to manage. From the perspective of data availability and protection, the information storage infrastructure is the most critical component of an overall IT infrastructure. It plays a key role in making applications work efficiently, both locally and across multiple sites. With the increasing complexity and criticality of storage, highly skilled and focused storage groups are as mission-critical as the technology being deployed.

Challenges Faced by IT/Storage Managers

These challenges are common to both large enterprises as well as SME (Small and Medium Enterprises) sectors of the industry:

• Managing storage growth
• Designing, deploying, and managing storage in a virtualized server environment
• Designing, deploying, and managing backup, recovery, and archive solutions
• Storage consolidation
• Making informed strategic/big-picture decisions
• Designing, deploying, and managing disaster recovery solutions
• Lack of skilled storage professionals
• Designing, deploying, and managing storage in a cloud computing environment
• Convincing higher management to adopt cloud
• Managing external cloud service providers

Each of these activities is on-going at various levels in each of the companies. Activities such as backup/recovery have been in practice for decades; still the professionals believe that they are not doing enough or not performing these activities well.

Complex Storage Environments

Data centers across the Americas, Europe, and Asia have deployed very similar storage solutions, including hardware and software. The sizes vary based upon business requirements, or in some cases a particular vendor may have a stronger presence in a given environment. However, on the whole, the deployed technology and challenges are very similar.

Storage Technology Segments

Storage technology deployment and its importance to the data center aligned with general market trends for each of the storage technology segments.

Each of the technology segments is unique, bringing its own specific business or operational values. For example, SAN and NAS provide connectivity options with unique functionality, while BR and replication technologies provide options for information protection against planned and unplanned outages. Technologies which enable cloud computing continue to generate significant interest.

Data Movement to Virtualized and Cloud Environments

Migrating to a highly virtualized cloud environment is a significant transformation, requiring a considerable amount of technology and business planning. Companies recognize the need for having an in-house team of professionals to lead the planning, design, and implementation of cloud and related technologies. Since cloud computing requires cross-skill expertise, IT professionals are required to have necessary knowledge across technologies that will be used in cloud infrastructure and services.

Formalized Storage Groups

Storage infrastructure is mission-critical, and a significant part of infrastructure budgets is allocated to storage-related products and services. A well-structured storage group of highly skilled professionals is key to building and maintaining high-performance, highly available storage infrastructures. Job titles and descriptions of dedicated storage professionals are evolving. With the advent of storage virtualization and cloud computing, the industry is expecting the expansion of core skills of storage professionals to include systems and networking skills.

Responsibilities

Storage groups are responsible for the overall planning, design, implementation, monitoring, managing, testing, and operation of all components in the infrastructure. Skills and processes are required to manage these tasks against expected expertise in one or more assigned “specialty” or storage technology segments.

Storage Group Skills and Performance

This is a key challenge for storage managers because it underscores the very real skills gap in their teams. Sub-optimal skills yield sub-optimal storage deployment. On the other hand, a well-skilled team will lead to higher productivity, better technology deployment and management, and optimal utilization of existing staff.

Sources for Hiring and Development

The most significant challenge faced by IT/storage managers is the shortage of skilled storage professionals in the marketplace. In fact, lack of skilled storage professionals is the most serious industry challenge. Considering the aggressive hiring requirements and plans, the lack of skilled resources becomes a serious bottleneck. There is a shortage of skilled manpower in the industry. Capable, experienced, and skilled individuals are usually not available to be hired.

Given that there exists a scarcity of certified or well-skilled storage professionals in the market, managers frequently resort to internal recruitment. Often internal recruitment involves moving an existing valuable employee who has different expertise (such as operating systems, databases, and so on) but has limited storage technology knowledge, which creates a knowledge gap in both technologies.

On-the-job training, technology vendor training, and self development by reading manuals typically cover usage and management of products and technology that is either already implemented or is in the process of being implemented. In addition, there is a need for wider and deeper training focusing on underlying technology concepts, planning, design, and management. This will enable storage professionals to independently and more efficiently design and deploy storage infrastructures that fully leverage the capabilities of all applicable storage technology segments.

Recommendations and Conclusions

From the perspective of data availability and protection, the information storage infrastructure is the most critical component of an overall IT infrastructure. It plays a key role in making applications work efficiently, both locally and across multiple sites. With the increasing complexity and criticality of storage, highly skilled and focused storage groups are as mission-critical as the technology being deployed.

Due to a lack of comprehensive storage technology education in the industry, most storage professionals have relied on on-the-job training, vendor product training, and self development.

Though probably adequate for day-to-day administration, a lack of broad and deep knowledge hampers the ability to make informed strategic decisions and to proactively plan, design, and manage storage infrastructure.

A lot of new technologies and concepts are coming to the data center realm in response to the pressuring needs of new business requirements. In this post, we will discuss one of those technologies named VXLAN. We will try to examine it closely to understand what the need for it is in data centers.

Problem statement

“The Cloud is the problem.” Yes it is, but how? The most basic definition of the cloud is the abstraction of software from hardware, which means that you can run your applications on any hardware that can be rented from a cloud provider. This hardware will also be used to host other companies’ applications, so I can have one cloud system running the applications of multiple companies at the same time. This, of course, will enhance resource utilization and introduce some advantages like pay-as-you-go models, but it also raises some concerns from the network perspective. Now we will have a shared physical infrastructure used to provide resources to multi-companies or multitenants in that situation, so how we can guarantee unique MAC addresses and unique VLAN assigned to the multitenants using the cloud?

Even if somehow you did manage to have some rigorous rules in place so you can guarantee that all companies using your cloud will never run into this situation, this can only happen if you restrict each tenant to a special range of VLANs and mac addresses — administrators won’t accept.

Also, do we have enough VLANS to run the network on the same cloud? Even if it is enough, do we have switches powerful enough to run STP for each VLAN to avoid looping? Even if we do, it is still not an efficient way of using the network since half of the links are blocked most of the time.

Server virtualization has placed increased demands on the physical network infrastructure. At a minimum, there is a need for more MAC address table entries throughout the switched Ethernet network due to potential attachment of hundreds of thousands of Virtual Machines (VMs), each with its own MAC address.

A related requirement for virtualized environments is having the Layer 2 network scale across the entire data center or even between data centers for efficient allocation of network and storage resources. Using traditional approaches like Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) for a loop free topology can result in a large number of disabled links in such environments.

So we try to replace STP with other technologies like CAT65k VSS or Nexus VPC, which relies mainly on port channel technologies. But instead of load balancing across physical links terminated on the same device, thanks to VSS or VPC we can now have a port channel terminated on two physical devices which is considered a good replacement for STP as it eliminates the need to block half of my links to avoid loops.

Now add hosting applications in the cloud. Cloud basic building blocks are pods, and a pod is a number of racks where each rack is a collection of prewired pretested devices that provide applications with system network and storage resources. When you deploy your application over the cloud, you might run into a situation where your applications are deployed over different pods, meaning in different layer 3 domains. Still these applications require layer two connectivity.

So to summarize all the above, here is what we need:

If we host two different companies’ applications, and both of them use the same VLANS or even the same MAC address, this should not be a problem.

If the applications are deployed on the same pod, meaning they are in the same layer 2 domain or on different pods, meaning the applications are in different layer 2 domains, the  applications still have layer 2 connectivity.

Also we need to effectively load balance the traffic across the PC since now most of the connections between the pods will rely on VPC and not STP.

The secret answer is VXLAN. So what is VXLAN? In short, it is the encapsulation of layer 2 frames in 4 headers:

• VXLAN headers
• UDP header
• Ip header
• Ethernet header

In the next blog post we’ll discuss why we need all of these headers.

The explosion of data, its criticality, and business’ growing dependency on digital information are leading to larger and more complex information storage environments that are increasingly challenging to manage.

IT/storage managers and storage professionals across companies of all sizes face the following mission-critical challenges:

• Managing storage growth
• Designing, deploying, and managing storage in a virtualized server environment
• Designing, deploying, and managing backup, recovery, and archive solutions
• Storage consolidation
• Making informed strategic/big-picture decisions
• Designing, deploying, and managing disaster recovery solutions
• Lack of skilled storage professionals
• Designing, deploying, and managing storage in a cloud computing environment
• Convincing higher management to adopt cloud
• Managing external cloud service providers

Impact of Cloud Computing

Migrating to a highly virtualized cloud environment is a significant transformation. It requires a considerable amount of technology and business planning. Since cloud computing requires cross skilled expertise, IT professionals are required to have necessary knowledge across technologies that will be used in cloud infrastructure and services.

Complex Storage Environments

Despite the differences in industry segments and the data center size, there is a strong consistency across companies in terms of the technology deployed, storage management practices, and challenges.

Nearly all critical data is now stored on external disk storage subsystems. The average usable capacity is approximately 1.3 PB which is typically spread across multiple sites. Growth in storage requirements, larger capacity disks and subsystems, and affordable pricing have all led to large storage configurations. Storage subsystems, SANs, and backup/recovery technologies are most commonly implemented, followed by NAS, DAS, and replication technologies. Technologies such as storage virtualization and cloud (private and public) have started to emerge strongly.

Each of these storage technology segments is unique, offering their own specific business and operational value. Each requires a different set of skills for effective design and management. Lack of knowledge and expertise in a specific segment can lead to under-deployment of one or more of these technologies.

Criticality of Storage and the Need for Formalized Storage Groups

Storage infrastructure is mission-critical. Losing storage in a catastrophic situation can severely damage a customer’s business. When a disaster does occur, information on storage subsystems can be lost permanently unless a well-designed recovery mechanism is planned and implemented.

In addition to reliable equipment, a well-structured storage group of highly skilled professionals is critical to build and maintain a high-performance, high availability storage infrastructure. Storage groups are responsible for overall planning, design, implementation, monitoring, administering, managing, and operations. While the structure of the group, titles, and roles may not be standardized, responsibilities and tasks are common across companies.

The Storage Technology Knowledge Gap

Although managers prefer to hire experienced or certified storage professionals, a severe shortage of such skills in the marketplace is causing managers to resort frequently to internal recruitment. The skills gap continues to widen as organizations adopt virtualization and cloud computing.

The shortage of experienced storage professionals and the lack of storage technology education in the marketplace and in academics have restricted the growth of information storage and management functions.

We now have the same discussion with Storage Area Network (SAN) administrators. People running data centers ask to trim the bottom line but still want ultimate design and infrastructure flexibility in an era where servers are not purchased for specific applications but rather to increase resources in the virtual cloud. Cisco has released a new product line called Nexus that makes data center managers and technical architects think twice about their equipment needs.

To quell any bandwidth issues, the Nexus switches offer 10GB connectivity to the hosts with some I/O modules capable of 40GB and even 100GB per port. This means a single physical optical cable could provide a server SAN/LAN and high-speed connectivity. This makes a lot of people happy, namely the server administrators and data center managers. The first group is happy because you address their needs and the second group because you reduce the costs to provision servers on the network.

Merging the SAN / LAN and infiniband capabilities into one wire and switch defines the Unified Fabric. However, network administrators are often left with the task of understanding how this Unified Fabric is going to work. SAN administrators have to worry about logical unit numbers (LUNs), initiators, targets, masking, and zoning, as well as the well-being of their storage arrays. Network administrators will be responsible for taking the native Fibre Channel traffic out of the SAN area of the data center, and transporting it to the hosts using Unified Fabric.

Cisco switches such as the Nexus 5000 series offer several options such as built-in FCOE/CE (Classical Ethernet) ports, as well as native Fibre Channel expansion modules to be able to communicate and/or convert an existing Fibre Channel infrastructure. In addition, there are newer models, such as the Cisco 5548UP and 5596UP switches that offer a “Unified Port” that can turn any port into a native FCOE/FC or FCOE/CE, giving you the ultimate flexibility. To top it off, storage vendors now sell FCOE storage processors (SPs) that can replace the need for Fibre Channel at the source and eliminate the need for conversion.

The Nexus switches were born of a fusion between Catalysts and MDS and can handle everything an MDS could do in the past. As a network administrator, it is possible to use Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to give “storage” permissions to the SAN administrators, and they can continue using tools like Fabric Manager with the Nexus without impacting LAN configurations.

The challenges for the network administrators are numerous. Classical Ethernet is built on a “connect anywhere” and oversubscription model where losing an Ethernet frame is not a problem. On the Fibre Channel side, however, the approach is totally different. Frames that are put on the wire are actually SCSI commands, and the SCSI protocol is built on a presumption that SCSI commands do not fail, and therefore there are no retransmission mechanisms built into the Fibre Channel Protocol.

FCOE does not change that behavior. In fact, FCOE doesn’t change anything but the envelope of the FC frame to make it readable by an Ethernet switch. In Unified Fabric, the segment that connects, for example, a Nexus switch to a server is called a Unified Wire since it will carry both CE and FCOE traffic.

QOS is very important in Unified Fabric since the FC traffic has a “lossless” guarantee. There are several components at play here, but in summary:

1. The Nexus switches tag the FC traffic with the highest priority, and
2. Virtual Output Queues (VOQ) can be involved for a switch to be certain that a path can be guaranteed for traffic, especially storage traffic.

What network administrators also need to understand are the overall configurations necessary to accommodate this new unified method. In a Unified Fabric model, the network interface cards (NICs) connecting the servers to their switches are called Converged Network Adapters (CNAs), and they are able to send FCOE and CE frames on the same wire. The FCOE Initialization Protocol (FIP) discovers the switch port it is connected to, which the Network Admin will have configured as a trunk carrying a Data VLAN and a Storage VLAN (later connected to a VSAN), and FIP will discover that information to connect. After that, the fabric login (FLOGI) and port login (PLOGI) process can continue for storage network and whatever else needs to happen on the CE side will continue as well.

The Unified Fabric model also brings several Ethernet enhancements to deal with this amalgamation of traffic, including two crucial ones: Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) and Data Center Bridging Exchange (DCBX). In the Cisco world, when two switches want to discover each other, they usually can exchange information automatically using the Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP). However, it is proprietary and cannot usually discovery other vendor switches. LLDP operates at layer 2 as well and is open-vendor, so you can now advertise certain capabilities related to the Unified Fabric with it. LLDP will use a tag, length, value (TLV) field to advertise that the switch or server that you are operating will be able to speak the DCBX protocol.

DCBX will allow both endpoints to negotiate certain features such as:

Priority Flow Control (PFC): the ability to prioritize certain types of traffic within classes using virtual lanes. In standard QOS, we can, for example, look at what is CE and what is FCOE. With PFC, we can look into FCOE and identify specific conversations within the protocol, thus giving the network admin more granular control. Additionally, we will now be able to stop a single virtual lane as opposed to an entire interface if a PAUSE frame is received.

• Enhanced Transmission Selection (ETS): tied closely with PFC but enables strict QOS policies on virtual lanes within an interface, giving us the ability to separate the 10GB interface into smaller chunks of bandwidth.
• Logical UP/DOWN: the ability to shut down a certain type of traffic without affecting the rest of the traffic traveling on a particular interface. For example, a network admin troubleshooting a Unified Port could issue a “Shutdown LAN” command to remove all the CE traffic to find out of the CE traffic is an issue.

These capabilities can be discovered automatically between Nexus Switches and generation II CNA adapters, reducing the amount of configuration required by the network administrators. They should be easy to adapt to a multi-vendor network since DCBX is an IEEE standard (although some vendors have been trying to throw their own proprietary information in it).

A Unified Fabric is not something that is out of reach, but it must be considered seriously by all the parties involved. Some data center managers get hung up on the fact that it will save them money and forget about the initial capital expenditure that needs to take place. SAN administrators may want to stonewall the project due to a lack of understanding of what this will actually accomplish, losing the bigger picture goal, which is to remove all the “SAN only” network gear, and network administrators need a strong understanding of Fibre Channel to understand how to verify end-to-end connectivity with the F, E, TE ports, as well as FLOGI and FCNS.

Related Courses
DCUFI — Implementing Cisco Data Center Unified Fabric v4.0 (formerly DCNX5+7)
DCUFD — Designing Cisco Data Center Unified Fabric v3.0

Excerpted from Global Knowledge: The Main Components of Unified Fabric by Alex Marcotte

What is Virtualization?

Simply put, server virtualization consists of running multiple operating systems and applications on the same server at the same time. The current process of partitioning one physical server into several operating systems, or virtual machines (VMs), lets you simultaneously deploy, operate, and manage these multiple operating system instances on that single physical server.

The concept of virtualization originated back in the era of mainframes. Today’s advances, especially the introduction of Intel x86 architecture and inexpensive PCs, finally made virtualization technology possible. This innovation enabled companies of all sizes to flexibly accommodate a multitude of users, extend the life of their datacenters, and save on hardware purchases and utility costs, in addition to streamlining server administration.

Moreover, virtualization substantially leveled the economic playing field, enabling small to medium businesses (SMBs) to compete and reach parity with much larger enterprises, something that was impossible a few years ago.

For SMBs, virtualization increases application availability and can dramatically shorten disaster recovery time to significantly improve business continuity preparedness.

For enterprises, virtualization offers levels of efficiency in security, management, automation, and VM deployment as well as the ability to provide increased resources to more users.

Advantages of Virtualization

There are a number of key areas in which virtualization offers companies important benefits:

Energy efficiency

By stacking multiple applications on a single server and sharing resources among them, virtualization optimizes server utilization and cuts waste. Lessening the physical size of datacenters also results in energy efficiency, decreased hardware costs, and maintenance savings.

Improved server utilization

Removing the physical relationship between an OS and its native hardware with virtualization greatly expands server capacity and avoids under-utilization where, in some instances, single servers use less than 30 percent of their processing power.

Architecture control

Virtualization enables companies of all sizes to simplify datacenter architecture. Virtualization not only provides built-in redundancy by spreading the computing power across multiple inexpensive machines, it also ensures a server resource pool.

Automation

The role of automation means that VMs can be copied, administered, and restored easily. Single-console management of VMs adds another layer of efficiency and increases response times during emergencies. The ability to shift VMs or other resources to a different server is another key feature. Administrators can conduct maintenance without interrupting service, disabling a system, or having to work off-hours.

Types of Virtualization

A common aspect of server virtualization renders each operating system instance independent of the other OSs on the same server. In this way, VMs are typically full implementations of a standard OS, such as Windows 7, running side by side with many other instances, for example, versions of Windows Vista or RedHat Enterprise Linux. Each OS then runs its own applications that are accessible to an almost unlimited number of users.

In the case of desktop virtualization, the client OS runs on a server in the datacenter and is delivered virtually to a user. It offers greater workplace efficiency, lower costs, and increased scalability for IT managers. Virtualized desktop users have the ease of mobility — they can access their desktop from anywhere by logging in as a unique user.

Essentially, there are four types of desktop virtualization:

• Thick client: This is a standard desktop supplied with a virtual desktop image delivered from the datacenter.
• Thin client: This employs a stripped-down OS and supports the user interface functionality (video, audio, printer, mouse, keyboard).
• Net client: This can be a mobile device, such as an iPhone running a specific OS.
• Zero client: All of the operating system runs on a server in the datacenter and is sent out to the client, nothing at desktop.

User virtualization provides the ability to maintain a fully personalized virtual desktop when not on the company network. For example, users can log into a workplace desktop from anywhere with all the settings and applications in place using a smart phone, tablet, or laptop.

For IT, user virtualization provides the ability to manage desktop components independently and apply them to a workspace as needed without scripting or group policies. IT administrators can perform:

• settings management
• workplace configuration
• application lock-downs
• streamlined management

In terms of application virtualization, formerly referred to as ‘thin client,’ applications are not installed locally on a workstation. Personal information and unique application characteristics are all stored on, managed, and delivered via a remote service. The local device provides the CPU and RAM required to run the software. Thus, the virtual applications run locally, but the management and application logic run remotely.

Next week will wrap this series up with a look at the top Virtualization players.

Excerpted from Global Knowledge: Virtualization 101 by Kerry Doyle

Application availability is critical for business. A company’s bottom line in many ways is directly associated with the availability of business-critical applications. There is a demand to protect every bit of information, and in the event of an outage, bring critical applications back online in the least amount of time with minimal to no information loss. This brings forth a dilemma for IT organizations that they must handle with prudence as they look to consolidate storage.

Backup and recovery is, in fact, one of the key reasons for consolidating storage. By being able to account for information/storage in one location, the overall backup and recovery process can be streamlined; staggered or continuous backup and recovery policies can be employed to minimize application downtime while providing the required level of protection to business from data loss.

Backup and Recovery Objectives: At the very outset of backup and recovery consolidation, the two key elements that require consideration are the recovery-point objective (RPO) of various applications and the recovery-time objective (RTO) that the business can afford. Once RPO and RTO requirements are determined, using different technologies for various backup and recovery schemes can be deployed.

Manage/Consolidate Data that Requires Protection: Managing the total volume of data that requires protection is essential in keeping the backup and recovery environment consolidated, and it plays a significant role in minimizing the overall storage requirements and cost of data protection. Typically, organizations incur significant charges associated with backup hardware and its maintenance. There are software tools that help identify and eliminate duplicate and non-unique content from data protection environments. These tools enable organizations to retain a single instance of common information with complete security and authenticity.

The Tiered Data Protection Model: Stringent backup and recovery requirements for business productivity, corporate governance, and compliance with regulations demand faster and increased protection of information. The evolution in data protection technology made it possible to create and implement backup and recovery architectures to meet these aggressive business demands.

Consolidation with Disk Library: With the introduction of disk backup libraries, organizations can fully leverage their disk storage infrastructure. With built-in high availability features and performance, organizations can continue to leverage their existing backup and recovery procedures established for tape libraries while storing data on disk media. This can eliminate service and maintenance costs associated with managing a tape infrastructure. Where retaining some information on tape is a necessity for vaulting purposes, data can be streamed from the disk library onto tape.

Storage Management Consolidation

Storage management can be thought of as the “control tower” for storage operations. By centralizing and consolidating storage management, organizations gain increased control over their resources across multiple operation centers. This helps establish standardized and streamlined storage policies and practices, deliver higher quality of storage services, and reduce the overall storage management cost.

From a business perspective, the net result of a well-designed, consolidated storage management environment is that it improves utilization of available capital resources, increases IT staff productivity with a decline in HR costs due to fewer required resources, and decreases license costs for management tools, along with significant improvement in the quality of service.

Business Continuance and Disaster Recovery Consolidation

With the growth of business comes the need to expand IT operations across multiple geographies. When not managed properly, distributed IT operations can result in significant cost to business. In an effort to improve efficiency and reduce cost, companies may consider consolidating to fewer, centralized, and well coordinated data centers across different geographies to serve business requirements in a more consistent fashion and act as consolidated disaster recovery sites.

Planning for Storage Consolidation—High-Level Considerations

In order to realize the full benefits and ensure success of storage consolidation projects, organizations must account for and execute a number of steps before, during, and after the storage consolidation. These steps include:

Consolidation Planning and Quality of Storage Service Considerations: The first step in any storage consolidation project is to develop a well-organized plan that includes a project feasibility study based on the type of consolidation under consideration. This plan also needs to include information on the creation of a tiered storage service model based on business requirements.

Service-Level Creation: The goal of creating service plans is to better serve IT customers by leveraging available consolidated storage resources in order to deliver measurable quality of service. These service plans such as platinum, gold, and bronze, need to outline the type and tier of storage software and hardware that will be utilized.

Storage Deployment Planning: Next is to determine how storage will be consolidated without impacting ongoing business operations including IT services that will be a part of this consolidation.

Consolidated Storage Operations Planning

Once the deployment plan is articulated, the next step is to take into account the day-to-day operations of the consolidated storage infrastructure. Here we need to address:

Storage growth and scalability requirements — How storage usage will be monitored and additional resources will be provisioned

Data protection and recovery requirements — Policies that will be employed to meet aggressive recovery-point and recovery-time objectives

Information archiving requirements — Tiered storage resources that will be utilized to archive information

Disaster Recovery and Replication Requirements

To ensure non-disruptive business operations and dispersion of consistent information across multiple data centers, appropriate use of replication technologies needs planning. Organizations must consider replication technologies that offer the flexibility required in implementing appropriate replication solutions according to business requirements.

Maintenance and Repair Services Requirements

One of the major benefits of consolidating storage is to simplify necessary maintenance and repair works. There is a significant cost that businesses incur as a result of scheduled or unscheduled downtime due to maintenance activities such as data backups, storage provisioning, firmware upgrades, and repair of hardware after a failure. Organizations spend millions of dollars renewing their maintenance and service contracts with suppliers. Hence it is critical to fully take into account the reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) features of storage hardware to be deployed.

Operations staff and skill requirements

Another driver for consolidating storage is the need to reduce staff requirements to manage fast-growing storage infrastructures. In order to reduce operational complexity and improve staff productivity, it is imperative to employ tools that are easy to use and feature a standard, intuitive methodology for managing storage across a broad set of resources. Automation of day-to-day storage administrative tasks are essential in improving staff productivity.

Electronic business information is one of the most valuable assets of any organization and continues to grow at an unprecedented pace. As a result, storage growth is outpacing most other information infrastructure components in IT. Consolidating information onto the right storage platform delivers significant business and technical value. Storage consolidation places IT on track to respond to future business requirements in a proactive and cost-effective manner.

There are a number of ways a business can consolidate storage:

Infrastructure Consolidation with iSCSI: iSCSI storage, while still in an early adoption phase, made it possible for many organizations to consolidate direct-attached storage into a storage network. With the use of an organization’s existing IP-network infrastructure, iSCSI eliminates the need to build a Fibre Channel storage infrastructure which helps lower the deployment cost.

When considering storage hardware products, it is critical to take into account capabilities such as built-in support for Fibre Channel and iSCSI protocols to accommodate evolving business requirements of large or small companies from an investment protection perspective.

Infrastructure Consolidation with Fibre Channel SAN: Medium-to-large-size organizations that adopted Fibre Channel SAN technology some time ago continue to benefit from these deployments. The challenge today is that due to either limitations in SAN technology that existed a few years ago or due to limited initial experimental SAN deployments with additional deployments over time, companies have accumulated numerous SAN islands within a data center.

By consolidating storage to a scalable platform, organizations can achieve significant improvement in storage utilization.

Infrastructure Consolidation with NAS—File Server Storage Consolidation: The growth in business can lead to proliferation of storage resources to a point where managing these resources not only becomes difficult but also quite expensive with diminishing returns. In order to reduce total cost in implementing and operating the supporting IT infrastructure, a networked-attached storage (NAS) architecture can play a critical role in heavy file serving environments.

By consolidating file servers and storage to NAS, organizations can simplify file server and storage management, consolidate hardware footprint to save floor space, and reduce the overall cost of operations.

Information Consolidation—Optimization with Tiered Storage: Business information must be retained for many years to remain compliant with regulations and fend off lawsuits and litigations. With the ongoing growth of information, storing all business information on primary disk storage can be costly. Hence, it is important to be able to classify information based on its relevant value to business and associate the appropriate class (tier) of storage for information retention.

Tiered Storage Archiving: A properly designed tiered storage archiving solution helps organizations in several ways. First the solution classifies and maps information value to business. Next, the solution consolidates all archiveable information in a centralized location making it easier to better manage and quickly retrieve information. Finally, by being able to create a balance between information value and its repository and by migrating less-critical information to low-cost storage, organizations can reclaim their premium tier-one storage for their most-critical business information, thus driving down the overall cost of storage and keeping the environment consolidated.

Database Information Archiving: Databases, which are prone to grow very large over many years of deployment, can make use of tiered storage and effectively consolidate database and manage cost. With the use of data classification software designed specifically for all popular databases, organizations can classify their SQL, Oracle, SAP, and other database structures and store database components on different classes/tiers of storage while maintaining relational structure between all database components to make it fully functional and operational from an end user’s perspective.

On the plus side, the Spanning-tree protocol is what first allowed us to create redundant paths within our switching infrastructure, making our data center much more resilient to outages than ever before. Anyone who’s experienced a “broadcast storm” knows the full value of Spanning-tree in the traditional switching environment. We’ve also seen many improvements in Spanning-tree over the years to make it work faster and more efficiently (i.e. Rapid Spanning-tree, Bridge Assurance, and many others).

On the flip side, this resiliency comes at a steep price. In order to ensure there are no loops in the switching infrastructure (still referred to as “bridging loops”… a hold-over from the modern switch’s predecessor, the bridge), Spanning-tree is forced to shut down additional interfaces above and beyond the first one between two switches. While we want additional bandwidth and redundancy, Spanning-tree simply sees these additional connections as loops and disables them. In the event of an outage on the first link, it will kick into action and select a new path, but this process takes an unreasonable amount of time by today’s data center standards.

With the introduction of the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), we are no longer bound by Spanning-tree’s restrictive management on our uplink Ethernet connections. By default, the UCS’s main components, the Fabric Interconnects, operate in End-Host mode. By doing this, the UCS system literally looks like a big computer with a bunch of ports to the north-bound LAN switches. With this, as long as a company has a standards-compliant network, they are able to simply “drop in” the UCS solution to their existing infrastructure. Because their existing network sees the UCS as just a “host”, the switches don’t think they’re connecting to another switch and therefore, no switching changes are needed.

While End-Host mode is worthy of its own blog series, it works by making the Fabric Interconnect logically invisible in the eyes of the south-bound blades in the Cisco 5108 chassis. Through the “pinning” of the blade’s network adapter (vNIC) to one of the Fabric Interconnect’s uplink ports or port-channels, the blade literally sees the LAN switch as its next hop. Effectively, any traffic that must leave the blade and enter the LAN cloud must exit and reenter through this pinned uplink. Because this is the case, it’s like the blade’s vNIC is directly connected to the LAN. Additionally, as long as the operating system installed on the UCS blades can understand and handle multipathing, it not only can achieve a direct logical connection to the LAN cloud, but it can also achieve an active/active connection via both Fabric’s A and B.

End Host mode allows us to use the UCS infrastructure components (the Fabric Interconnects and IOM modules) to transparently manipulate the flow of traffic between the networking adapters on the blades and the LAN switches. Also, because the logical next hop for the blade is not the Fabric Interconnects but the north-bound switch, this means that no bridging loops can exist within the UCS architecture!  Because no bridging loops can physically exist, there’s no need for Spanning-tree.

Again, End-Host mode is the default mode for the UCS architecture and is the best practice recommendation for operation within your data center. Reclaiming the simultaneous use of all of our networking uplinks through the reduction or elimination of Spanning-tree is just part of Cisco’s larger data center design philosophy regarding the Nexus Operating System (NX-OS). Other features, such as the new TRILL-based Fabric Path, are emerging NX-OS features designed to eliminate the effects of Spanning-tree within the data center. It’s never been a more exciting time to dive into Cisco’s data center offerings… stay tuned for many more posts on these amazing technologies!

Recommended Courses
DCUCD v4.0 — Data Center Unified Computing Design
DCUCI v4.0 — Data Center Unified Computing Implementation