In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I wanted to take the time and share a story I recently heard on the story behind the Cisco UCS platform. Note, this is a retelling of the story I’m sure handed down throughout the years, so apologies ahead of time for any inaccuracies.
The year was 2007 and in the world of server hardware competition was getting stiff. As new chipsets were released roughly semi-annually, the idea of “competition” had become who could fit the latest and greatest in their boxes first and deliver it to the market. It was around this time that Cisco executives realized in order to differentiate the long established brand a new approach was in order…lucky for them…they had an Ace up their sleeve. Enter…the “Dream Team.”
Roaming the halls of Cisco were a group of engineers that were known as somewhat of the “Dream Team” for developing innovative solutions. As it was told, these talented individuals were sequestered away and told to develop a server platform from the ground up. Translation…”Forget everything about what we currently do. If you could build all this from scratch…how would you do it?” For months they worked feverishly on pioneering a new product line. First came the idea of a single backplane for providing the basics; power, networking, cooling. After a blade-chassis architecture was determined as the best fit, they determined a software platform would be needed to efficiently manage the blade servers. Introduce the Cisco Unified Computer Systems (UCS) Manager.
| Cisco UCS | Traditional Server | |
| Power Ports | 4 | 16 |
| Network Ports | 4 | 24+ |
| Rack Units (RU) | 6* | 8-16 |
With the aid of service profiles, UCS Manager makes it possible for servers to be built/swapped/replaced in a plug-n-play fashion to the likes of which didn’t exist previously. When it was all said and done, Cisco had a server architecture that fit eight servers in a 6RU form factor with smaller footprints for network and power cabling.
I know personally, coming from your traditional 1U/2U servers, the initial complexity of the Cisco UCS B series was mildly intimidating. Between the new terminologies of backplane, Nexus 5000/7000/9000, fabric interconnects, fabric extenders, service profiles, and the related acronyms that came with them…it was a bit overwhelming. One of the best articles I found summarizing this was Tintri’s white paper on Cisco UCS B-Series Best Practice & Deployment Guide.
Again in the spirit of Thanksgiving, I’d like to say…I’m thankful to Cisco for creating the UCS server platform and for Tintri by DDN for explaining it’s complexities so well in this white paper!