There’s been a lot of talk about the cloud. While many companies can rely on a public cloud, an increasingly number are looking to new technology offerings that make it easier to build their own private cloud – with less space and increased performance.

I tend to shy away from getting too technical in this blog, but this will be an exception to the rule as I share the new architecture available for data centers and how it can be applied in small businesses.

For the first time, some of the industry’s leading vendors are working together to give organizations a seamless solution. VMware, Cisco, and EMC have partnered to create a joint venture company called VCE. They have worked extensively to create a set of standardized configurations, software and hardware enhancements, and industry changing technologies for the data center.

VCE sells a single product called vBlock. It is a pre-configured Cisco Unified Computing Platform and an EMC VNX next generation storage platform, all running VMware as Cloud OS. Put simply, it’s a data center in a box (rack). The benefits of this collaboration beyond convenience and ease is a tighter integration, better performance, and a whole new set of industry leading features and changes. 

How it’s used 
Along with this “box” offering, VCE developed a set of specifications on hardware, software, and implementation solution that provide the same benefits as the vBlock technology. This allows integrators like Marco to size an appropriate solution for anyone from the very small business to the large multi-nationals without sacrificing performance, capacity, usability or the bottom line.

At Marco, we were able to consolidate our entire production data center from our previous virtualization of more than 30 physical servers to three Cisco blade servers. Each blade server is currently using less than half of its RAM capacity, which allows for easy expansion in the future. Each blade server is outfitted with the latest generation of Intel E7 processors that offer 10 cores each, hyper threaded to 20 cores. That gives VMware 40 cores per blade to use for vCPUs.

By using what is called a N+1 setup, the entire company can operate on two blades and the entire data center solution (including the blade chassis, blade servers, power, fabric interconnects, and redundant Nexus data center switching) can operate on only 11 rack units.

How it works
So, how does it work? Cisco Unified Computing is a data center blade server platform (techie for sleek and fast) with a simplified and consolidated management system, known as the UCS manager. UCS was designed from the ground up around 10GB Ethernet and a Unified Fabric with Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). That setup means even the smallest businesses that want to keep their data in-house can have the speed, security and reliability they need.  The system is designed to start small and scale to any size company. 

Why it’s used
While some of this may sound quite technical, this data center infrastructure virtually eliminates the complexity that is inherent in traditional data center setups. Instead of managing a handful of vendors to get the solution they need, small and medium businesses can deploy a solution in less than 30 days with a single phone call. Once it’s operational, the technical support is simplified, too, and only takes one call. The best part for businesses is that it has a direct impact on the bottom line by delivering a sustainable lower total cost of ownership.