Solved: Green computing

HotmailUser · ‎05-07-2008

Is there a manageability interface available with Cisco's InfiniBand switches to optionally take them offline and bring them back online when I would need them?

Here's what I'm thinking: I plan to build a few datacenters around the planet and I'll deploy a single I/O fabric - InfiniBand - for all I/O across all those datacenters, including storage, IPC, network management, etc. I would want to take entire IP subnets offline when there's less load on my network and bring them online as more load hits the network. Can Cisco's InfiniBand hardware fully participate in this energy optimization?

Thanks.

bhedlund · ‎05-07-2008

This sort of dynamic and adaptive orchestration of Data Center resources you speak of is the sole purpose and vision of Cisco's VFrame Data Center product. And yes, VFrame does support Infiniband, and Nexus, and MDS, and Catalyst switches, and oh VMWare too!

In a nutshell this is Data Center 3.0 ...

http://cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns708/networking_solutions_solution_segment_home.html

Cheers,

Brad

View solution in original post

bhedlund · ‎05-13-2008

Yes, Cisco VFrame supports a full open API architecture. So, not only does VFrame work with Cisco products but it can also interface to non-Cisco gear (IBM, HP, UNIX, Windows, etc.) with API's written by the respective vendors or a 3rd party. With VFrame API we have really opened up a whole new market for software programmers.

Cisco VFrame also has an optional server agent that runs on the server to report load and other stats back to VFrame. This agent can also be used to gracefully shut down a server when it is no longer needed and therefore saving on power/cooling costs.

Hope this helps. Please rate all helpful posts.

Thanks,

Brad

View solution in original post

bhedlund · ‎05-07-2008

This sort of dynamic and adaptive orchestration of Data Center resources you speak of is the sole purpose and vision of Cisco's VFrame Data Center product. And yes, VFrame does support Infiniband, and Nexus, and MDS, and Catalyst switches, and oh VMWare too!

In a nutshell this is Data Center 3.0 ...

http://cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns708/networking_solutions_solution_segment_home.html

Cheers,

Brad

HotmailUser · ‎05-08-2008

I'm trying to convince Microsoft to build intelligence into their System Center product that can determine the load on a network across all their different server products.

Does Cisco currently have something that can give me those numbers for Microsoft server products?

Thanks.

HotmailUser · ‎05-11-2008

Yeah, I looked at VMWare products back in 2007 and I found that their VM technologies only allowed atmost 2-way SMP within their VMs for guest OSes. Now, I realise that that's better than the single core facilitation of Microsoft's Virtual Server 2005 product, but here's my point:

These VM technologies must translate guest OS threads natively to host OS threads thereby allowing the use of the host OS thread scheduler to allocate CPU resources. For eg: I have a dual quad-core Xeon CPU box. What's the point if these VMs can only use 2 cores at any one time? I hope you get my point.

So, I'll just stick with the 8-way SMP capability of Server 2008 Hyper-V VMs. I haven't looked at what VMWare products are now capable of, but they had disappointed me, so I won't bother. And despite what Wall Street thinks, I don't think VMWare is hot technology. I'll just get most of my software infrastructure from a single vendor - Microsoft.

Does Cisco's VFrame have programming APIs that I can use? Can I use WMI in Windows Server 2008, or even better - PowerShell APIs - to control VFrame?

Thanks.

bhedlund · ‎05-13-2008

Yes, Cisco VFrame supports a full open API architecture. So, not only does VFrame work with Cisco products but it can also interface to non-Cisco gear (IBM, HP, UNIX, Windows, etc.) with API's written by the respective vendors or a 3rd party. With VFrame API we have really opened up a whole new market for software programmers.

Cisco VFrame also has an optional server agent that runs on the server to report load and other stats back to VFrame. This agent can also be used to gracefully shut down a server when it is no longer needed and therefore saving on power/cooling costs.

Hope this helps. Please rate all helpful posts.

Thanks,

Brad

jcshen · ‎06-03-2008

VFrame currently has SOAP API support which is language-independent.

James