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Datacenter Upgrade

M

mct

[H]ard|Gawd
2FA
Joined
Jul 14, 2004
Messages
1,246
I figured I would jump on the bandwagon and show some pics of our current datacenter upgrade.

These are pics, front and back of the NS-480 that we purchased to replace our current CX3-10 and NetApp 3020. The top DAE contains 2TB SATA drives which will be used for our file shares. The rest of the DAEs contain 450GB 15k drives. EMC did a great job of cabling this up before it was shipped to us.

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These are front and back pics of our Avamar setup.

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Here are some picks of our Nexus 7k and UCS. The 7k will be replacing our current core and the UCS will be replacing our existing ESXi hosts. The current cabling in the Nexus is temporary. The permanent cabling will be much neater.
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This last pic is of some of the equipment that will be going to our DR site. We are currently in the process of building out a DR site. We have matching NS-480s, Nexus 7ks, and UCS. Not pictured is our Centera setup. I will get pictures of it soon.

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Needless to say we have alot of work cut out for us. Want to give a big thanks to NetJunkie and the other guys at Varrow for providing us with their services for this project.
 
Very nice! Crappy phone pics alert! I built the HP environment/Wintel/Hyper-V/10GBe environment myself, the EMC/VMware/FC-1GBe iSCSI environment, I inherited. Funny thing is, even with the way it looks, I would take the EMC/VMware environment over the HP/Hyper-V environment any day of the week!..lol I was shot down on Cisco UCS and unified fabric for no reason other than the "Solutions Architect" couldn't quite grasp the concept. I should show him your pictures and compare it to our HP setup...I think he would certainly understand at least from a Data Center capacity standpoint.

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Vader said:
Very nice! Crappy phone pics alert! I built the HP environment/Wintel/Hyper-V/10GBe environment myself, the EMC/VMware/FC-1GBe iSCSI environment, I inherited. Funny thing is, even with the way it looks, I would take the EMC/VMware environment over the HP/Hyper-V environment any day of the week!..lol I was shot down on Cisco UCS and unified fabric for no reason other than the "Solutions Architect" couldn't quite grasp the concept. I should show him your pictures and compare it to our HP setup...I think he would certainly understand at least from a Data Center capacity standpoint.

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Sorry about the crappy pics. I do wish I had my camera with me when I decided to take them. For us UCS was a no brainer. It almost didn't make it in the budget however Cisco heavily discounted some UCS bundles at the end of last year and so we would have been crazy not to find a way to fit them in the budget. Send that Solutions Architect over to Brad Hedlund's blog. He has a lot of useful information about UCS and Nexus. Maybe then he will see the light.
 
I always thought the UCS platform was fugly. I understand the benefits, but damn, that looks like an eyesore to me. So utilitarian, but I suppose that is all that matters. I'm too much of an HP C Class fanboi I guess :(. Then again, I <3 brocade too. You couldn't pry cisco switches out of my cold dead hands though for setting up a enterprise network -- VMware involved or not. Cool pics tho you guys :).
 
defuseme2k said:
I always thought the UCS platform was fugly. I understand the benefits, but damn, that looks like an eyesore to me. So utilitarian, but I suppose that is all that matters. I'm too much of an HP C Class fanboi I guess :(. Then again, I <3 brocade too. You couldn't pry cisco switches out of my cold dead hands though for setting up a enterprise network -- VMware involved or not. Cool pics tho you guys :).
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I agree that Cisco does have an ugly design with the UCS chassis.
 
Sorry about the crappy pics. I do wish I had my camera with me when I decided to take them.
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I was saying my phone pics were crappy..your pics were fine..lol.;)
 
Bah. The UCS hardware looks awesome. It's so simple and straight forward. Very little cabling. Tons of performance. What's not to love?
 
NetJunkie said:
Bah. The UCS hardware looks awesome. It's so simple and straight forward. Very little cabling. Tons of performance. What's not to love?
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Maybe I'm just mad at them :). You know what I'm talking about. Anyway, UCS hardware does NOT look awesome, except to a nerd. I'm a nerd too, but I think the C Class looks much better as far as just blades go :).
 
Out of interest. What made you go with the UCS? Don't tell me Cisco got you with there CUCM requirements for virtualization...
 
FlangeMonkey said:
Out of interest. What made you go with the UCS? Don't tell me Cisco got you with there CUCM requirements for virtualization...
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Yeah, this is the biggest crock of shit. Not supporting it on other vendor's hardware when its abstracted in the first place. Such bullshit. Err. what did I say? ahem.
 
FlangeMonkey said:
Out of interest. What made you go with the UCS? Don't tell me Cisco got you with there CUCM requirements for virtualization...
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I'll speak for why we sell so much UCS. Single point of management across all blade chassis. Better memory performance than others. 10Gb native. Service Profiles so you can easily move a server from one blade to any other blade in any chassis with a simple reboot. Palo/VIC card is great (much better than Flex-10). Better QoS and rate limiting. Very good VMware integration. Cheaper than other blade manufacturers after you go beyond a single chassis. FAR less points of management (just the interconnects..nothing in each chassis). Much easier to do firmware upgrades (one single place. one single process). Chassis are in place upgradable to 40Gb.

Cisco did a great job. They had no legacy customers to support. No legacy software or hardware to consider. It was a clean slate taking advantage of their knowledge of other chassis-based systems.
 
FlangeMonkey said:
Out of interest. What made you go with the UCS? Don't tell me Cisco got you with there CUCM requirements for virtualization...
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CUCM did not play a role in our decision to go with UCS. Our decision was based on pretty much everything NetJunkie said and the price was right. The UCS fits our needs very well.
 
NetJunkie said:
Bah. The UCS hardware looks awesome. It's so simple and straight forward. Very little cabling. Tons of performance. What's not to love?
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Let us be honest here. If that thing said HP or Foundry on it you would be saying it's the ugliest thing you have ever seen:D.
 
Frankly, I could care less how "sexy" any of this is. If it does the job well, provides easier/less administration, and saves $$ then we're happy.
;)
 
Vader said:
Frankly, I could care less how "sexy" any of this is. If it does the job well, provides easier/less administration, and saves $$ then we're happy.
;)
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This is how I feel. Looks were not even on our list when we were deciding whether or not we wanted to move forward with UCS. Now granted, if looks had been on the list we would have marked it down as butt ugly:D.
 
Is the UCS for mainly mid-size companies and my definition of midsize would be (100+ employees) ?
 
jenuster said:
Is the UCS for mainly mid-size companies and my definition of midsize would be (100+ employees) ?
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Size of the company doesn't matter..it's how many servers you need and the ease of management you want. I've sold plenty of 4-blade Cisco UCS bundles (~$45K).
 
jenuster said:
im going to try out the simulator to get a feel for it
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The new (1.4) Cisco UCS PE (Platform Emulator) is awesome. Made it a lot easier to change the configuration. You can even import your physical configuration in to model your environment. It's the same exact code that runs on the UCS interconnects so you can do all sorts of cool testing and simulations with it.
 
Good stuff. I have to help wire our new Nexus 7000 next week and spent all day configuring the vm servers for the new cloud project. I'm scared to even look at it after the cto said "you break it, you buy it."
 
I just went through a very similar exercise. We went a different route. We went with Brocade MLXe 1600 and VDX 6760's in a redundant setup with Dell M1000e chasis and M710hd's with the Brocade CNAs and a NetApp v3240.

It was a very hard decision between this and the Cisco solution, but in the end this fit our requirements better and actually came out at a lesser cost. I am a fan of both UCS and the Nexus line and depending on the business and the requirements would consider using them again anytime
 
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