Bladewatch.com

Cisco and the youtube video on the new Cisco rack server

BOSTON – Cisco Partner Summit – June 3, 2009 – Cisco today announced plans to grow, motivate and evolve its global community of data center channel partners and customers to further accelerate the market transition toward virtualized data centers.  Cisco introduced several channel programs designed to help partners gain new revenue opportunities and evolve their businesses toward a unified data center practice.  To meet the growing need for information technology (IT) skills that span the full spectrum of data center technologies, Cisco introduced two new IT career certifications.  Cisco also announced an expansion of the Unified Computing System Family with the new C-Series of Rack-Mount Servers designed to help accelerate the adoption of unified computing and data center virtualization solutions.

Cisco are continuing their work and evolution of their Unified Computing System with announcements of new rack servers which sounds very cool and should bring more choice for the end user community, and further moves towards virtualization of the infrastructure for easier provisioning, management and support, to reduce the time to live. I note they are also set to offer certification in the Unified Computing System, I wonder if we wont see more movements in this area, in terms of production support specialists, with exposure to Unix/VMware/Citrix/Windows and the server? As the infrastructure becomes more blur, more complex and linked in a service offering, I no longer need engineers that only know Citrix, I need engineers that know Citrix as well as the underlying operating system, VMware, and application experience? We’ll see, I’m off to check out more to answer the thoughts below:

On the rack servers/blades a few things that will be of interest to me:

• Operating systems supported
• Hardware specifications and memory support/disk support etc
• Remote sytems management features – like lights out/ILO
• Driver pack information – features and layered applications like the HP IML etc
• Firmware upgrade process – can we do it online and reboot later
• If we change the firmware do we need to upgrade the drivers?

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.