A few years back, the world as I knew it got rocked to the core. No, I didn’t lose a loved one to a sudden and unexpected illness, nor did I find out my wife was leaving me for the pool guy (even though I don’t have a pool, let alone a jacuzzi) but you get the point. In my mind, this catastrophe was on par with something just as cataclysmic … I lost my entire library of digital music due to a dead hard-drive. Over 10,000 of my beloved songs ranging from “Hungry like the Wolf” by Duran Duran to “Nothing But a G Thang” by Dr. Dre vanished within the blink of any eye. Having worked in the data storage industry for years, I had no one to blame but myself for not diligently following a data backup policy. It took me about two months of painstaking labor to rebuild my library from scratch … oh well, live and learn right? Well, I can tell you that was the first and last time it ever happened because I discovered a little thing called “The Cloud.”
So what is the cloud? In the most simplistic of terms, the cloud is as old and simple as the Internet itself. The cloud is really just about accessing storage or software remotely from a computer via the Internet. However, as simple as it may seem, the cloud is big business.
Keep in mind, when you start talking about the cloud being deployed in data center environments, the benefits it provides increase tenfold. This leads me to talking about Cisco’s recent announcement on February 1, which further validated their commitment to help customers build intelligent infrastructures ready to support cloud-based environments.
According to the Cisco® Cloud Index, more than 50 percent of computing workloads in data centers will be cloud-based by 2014, and global cloud traffic will grow more than 12 times by 2015, to 1.6 zettabytes per year – the equivalent of more than four days of business-class video for every person on Earth. Based on these trends, Cisco announced it updated its switching portfolio with 100 Gigabit Ethernet (100GE) and 40GE capabilities, the next speed limits for networking. These new capabilities provide a holistic architectural approach across campus, data center and service provider environments, and give customers a significant advantage while addressing emerging trends like cloud, video, mobility, and the proliferation of 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE).
With this announcement, Cisco, which already offers one of the industry’s broadest switching portfolio, becomes a key provider of 1/10/40/100GbE and converged networking switching solutions. Supporting the transition to higher networking speeds, in addition to Cisco’s recently announced CloudVerse solution, is a key element of Cisco’s strategy to help its customers meet the demands of emerging cloud computing trends and the resulting data deluge.
Cisco is delivering investment protection with 40GbE performance options to its Catalyst 6500 switching line, and 40 GE and 100 GE capabilities in its Nexus 7000 portfolio for interconnecting data centers to service providers. To expand its campus aggregation and data center top of rack switching, Cisco also announced two new fixed-configuration platforms that provide high-density 10GbE switching. Making it easy to use this capacity, Cisco announced simpler network virtualization functionality for its Catalyst 6500, 4500 and Aggregation Services Router (ASR) 1000 product lines with a new technology called Easy Virtual Network. They also added scalable virtual services with a new Nexus 1010-X appliance for the data center. Together, these enhancements will help businesses scale their networks, simplify operations, and protect their existing Cisco switching investments – many of which have been deployed for a decade or longer. Cisco recently reached switching milestones of 10 million deployed 10GbE switched ports since 2002, and 23,000 NX-OS customers, the operating system that supports Cisco’s entire data center portfolio.
And where does Emulex fit into all of this? Emulex has worked closely with Cisco to ensure that our Emulex OneConnect 10GbE LAN on motherboard (LOM) and 10GbE Universal Converged Network Adapters (UCNAs) are fully compatible and maximize IT managers’ investments in their Nexus and MDS infrastructure. So, whether you or your customer are looking for an answer on a Massively Scalable Data Center, Private/Hybrid Cloud, Big Data, High Frequency Trading or a traditional Data Center, Cisco and Emulex have the solution for you.
In closing, my updated library of digital music has grown to about 15,000 songs since that traumatic incident a few years back. Granted, now that I have three boys under the age of five, the spectrum of musical tastes ranges from everything Disney to Justin Bieber (God help me). However, at the end of the day, I can go to bed in peace with the sublime knowledge that if one of my twin boys decides to projectile vomit on my laptop (and also manages to hit my external hard drive three feet away), I have nothing to worry about. Sure, my $2,500 Mac will be fried into oblivion and I’ll need to bust out my carpet cleaner for the umpteenth time.
What matters most is I’ll be dreaming peacefully about my library of digital songs being nice and safe … nestled in the cloud, with an army of server storage standing sentry over them every night ready to do battle with a bad hard drive (or vomit for that matter).
For more information on Cisco’s recent announcement please visit:
http://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?type=webcontent&articleId=657081
http://blogs.cisco.com/news/cisco-switching-leadership-and-innovations/
