Unified Fabric

What Is Unified Fabric? What Is Unified Fabric?

Cisco Unified Fabric is a key building block for both traditional and virtualized data centers. Cisco Unified Fabric unifies storage and data networking to deliver seamless convergence, scalability and intelligence with reduced total cost of ownership and faster return on investment. As a foundational pillar for Ciscos Data Center Business Advantage Framework, it complements Unified Network Services and Unified Computing approaches to deliver compelling business value to customers. of virtual machines along with the challenges of cloud computing. Cisco Unified Fabric seamlessly extends the network to encompass all network locations into a single extended environment, allowing resources to be efficiently accessed and effectively utilized regardless of size or scope.

At-A-Glance

bandwidth-hungry multimedia applications, explosive storage growth, rising energy costs.

What Solutions Does Unified Fabric Enable?

Private cloud computing, workload consolidation, desktop virtualization/VDI, backup/recovery, business continuity, pre-integrated data center pods.

Intelligence
Cisco Unified Fabric continues and extends Ciscos strategy of embedding policy-based, intelligent services directly into the network fabric to create a service platform to deliver services throughout the data center in a consistent and uniform manner. Benefits from this approach include:

What Unified Fabric Does (System-level Vision)

Unifies the way servers and storage resources are connected, application delivery and core data center services are provisioned, how servers and data center resources are interconnected to scale, and how server and network virtualization is orchestrated.

Convergence
Cisco Unified Fabric provides the flexibility of high-performance, highly available networks to serve diverse data centers needs including the lossless requirements to carry storage traffic (FC, FCoE, iSCSI, NAS) over Ethernet. Offering the best of both LAN and SAN worlds, Unified Fabric enables storage network users to take advantage of the economy of scale, robust vendor community and aggressive roadmap of Ethernet while providing high-performance, lossless characteristics of a Fibre Channel storage network. Convergence reduces total cost of ownership through both reduced CapEx (host interfaces, cables, upstream switch ports) and OpEx (power, cooling, rackspace/ floorspace) and was designed to be adopted incrementally without forklift upgrades and without disruption to existing management and operations procedures.

Ubiquity: availability of all services, whether physical applications, virtual workloads or other infrastructure elements, to all elements of the data center Scalability: service delivery capability automatically scales with changes in the size of the network Agility: faster application deployment with policy-based compliance instead of physical infrastructure changes

Main Benefits of Unified Fabric

Delivers reliable, agile and cost-effective network services to servers, storage, and applications while improving the user experience. Facilitates better support of virtualization and cloud services with improved staff utilization, more efficient resource utilization (more load on servers and storage), lower TCO, and better resiliency and uptime.

Why Is Unified Fabric Required?

To support data center evolution towards virtualization and cloud architectures; enable improved deployment, operation, and end user experience of virtualized resources; and meet growing bandwidth and computing requirements. Cross-data center processes, such as backup/recovery and workload mobility, require data center transformation.

Cisco Differentiators
Only vendor with server and switch platforms natively designed for integrated virtualized services; leader with early participation in LAN/SAN convergence standards; pioneer of interconnect switching experience; first to bring intelligent virtualization into the network, enabling services and resources anytime anywhere.

Scalability
Cisco uniquely offers three-dimensional scalability for the data center network: performance, magnitude (ports and bandwidth), and geographic span. Unified Fabric scalability enables enterprises to scale simultaneously on multiple fronts to support changing traffic patterns in the data centers including larger, more complex workloads brought about by virtualization and the proliferation

What Trends Does Unified Fabric Address?

Continued data center consolidation, server virtualization scale limited by I/O bottlenecks and integration complexity with network infrastructure, increasingly

How Does Unified Fabric Fit into the Data Center Business Advantage Architecture?
Unified Fabric is a foundational pillar to support application performance, application delivery and services delivery enabling overall solutions such as business continuity and virtualization while providing energy efficient, resilient, and secure data centers.

2010 Cisco and the Cisco Logo are trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. A listing of Cisco's trademarks can be found at www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. (1007R)

Unified Fabric
What Is Unified Fabric?
Hundreds of IT organizations, such as University of Arizona, Salem Hospital, Epiq Systems, Coca Cola, NetApp & many more, are already leveraging the benefits of an incremental approach to Unified Fabric by starting at the server access layer Detailed case studies are available here: http://www. cisco.com/en/US/products/ps9670/prod_case_studies_ list.html, with Ciscos partner ecosystem developing end-to-end FCoE-enabled products for increased customer benefit.

At-A-Glance

Nexus 7000 / Nexus 1000v / Nexus 1010 / UCS: Unifies the way application delivery services are provisioned for optimized application performance Nexus 1000v / FabricPath / OTV: Unifies the way server and network virtualization are orchestrated for greater simplicity, resiliency and mobility

Scalable Fabric: brings intelligent virtualization into the network, enabling services and resources anytime anywhere for any size network Intelligent Fabric: As customers deploy or refresh data center services such as load balancing, increasingly they will be deployed as virtual appliances on the network

How Will the Unified Fabric Evolve?

Overall, the data center journey is from point virtualization to more strategic server and storage virtualization projects evolving to private cloud initiatives. Cisco Unified Fabric supports this journey through evolutionary components such as:

Most Important Products/Innovations Supporting the System-level Vision

MDS / Nexus 2000 / 4000 / 5000 / 7000: Unifies the way servers and storage resources are connected for lower TCO

Converged Fabric: converging protocols and physical networks for improved manageability

Three Pillars of Unified Fabric

Converged Fabric

Products/Technologies
MDS Multi-layer Storage Switches/ Nexus 2000/ 4000/5000/7000 DCNM, NX-OS

Description
Converged network protocols and infrastructure for LAN and multi-protocol storage traffic over Ethernet. Enables customer choice and simplicity: single infrastructure technology (Ethernet), single access layer switch, unified port , customer option for unified wire or separate infrastructure: Incudes FC, iSCSI, FCoE, DCB, CIFS, NFS protocols

Target Audience
CxO, SAN administrators, network architects

IT Initiatives
Data center consolidation; server refresh projects; OpEx reduction and simplification initiatives; greenfield data center build-out

Infrastructure Scalable Fabric Catalyst 4900, Nexus 2000/4000/ 5000/ 7000; DCNM, NX-OS Fabric Extension, FabricPath, VDCs, vPC Connect and extend scalable, intelligent, highly available fabrics for both traditional and virtualized data centers Server administrators, network administrators, virtualization administrators Business continuity & disaster recovery; management and infrastructure optimization

Intelligent Fabric

Catalyst 6500, MDS Multilayer Storage Switches; Nexus 1000v/ 1010/2000/4000/ 5000/7000 DCNM, NX-OS OTV, VN-Link, and MDS ServicesOriented SAN: I/O Accelerator, Storage Media Encryption (SME), Data Mobility Manager (DMM)

Cisco services embed critical, policy-based intelligent functionality into the Unified Fabric for both traditional and virtualized data centers. Distributed, network-integrated services enable scale, performance, agility and operational simplicity. MDS Services-Oriented SAN similarly delivers advanced, integrated storage services to improve agility and enable Cloud Storage deployments.

Server administrators, network administrators, virtualization administrators

Virtualization initiatives; charge back initiatives (shift from IT as cost center to service bureau); performance improvement projects

2010 Cisco and the Cisco Logo are trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. A listing of Cisco's trademarks can be found at www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. (1007R) C45-617345-00 09/10