Cisco UCS Director

Cisco UCS Director is the solution of infrastructure management of DPC.

On December 20, 2013 the Cisco company announced an exit of release of Cisco UCS Director v.4.1.

Description

A system is capable to increase the general transparency, to lower labor costs, to increase the speed of accomplishment of all processes.

The solution Cisco UCS Director is unique because of abilities to manage computing resources, network and storage systems from a uniform point. The software product is equipped with a uniform control panel for all subsystems, guarantees simple and fast preparation and deployment of the new systems due to use of the automation equipment, a self-service portal, the built-in functionality of providing infrastructure as service (IaaS).

The storage system of EMC, the server system of virtualization of VMware, single system of the unified calculations of Cisco UCS and the network convergent Cisco switches Nexus is integrated into proposed solution.

This product - result of developments of Cisco Cloupia company. At the beginning of 2013 Cisco UCS Director is brought to the market and afterwards Cisco carried out its rebranding.

A system is focused on the enterprises of medium and large business - for creation of private corporate "clouds" and also on service providers - for automation of process of providing cloud services to external consumers.

Advantages of the solution UCS Director

• increase in flexibility and reduction in cost of ownership of IT infrastructure,
• fast deployment and integration of new services and services,
• simplification of management and monitoring of systems and servers.

Cisco UCS Director supports platforms from different vendors, helping with management of computing functions Cisco, devices Dell, IBM and HP. The companies where the hardware systems of other companies are installed, can use the solution Cisco UCS Director, without changing architecture data processing center.

2014

Integration of Cisco UCS Director Express and Apache Ambari

On September 15, 2014 the Cisco company announced integration of the Cisco UCS Director Express application with Apache Ambari.

The Cisco company presented the solution UCS Director Express for Big Data which helps the organizations to cope with problems of data management and efficiency of monitoring of clusters of Apache Hadoop and to expand the opportunities in the field of IT.

UCS Director Express for Big Data represents the easy-to-work solution for automation of deployment of the Apache Hadoop platform and the joint management of physical infrastructure and software of Hadoop. The solution is integrated with main products with the open code and provides the approved and repeated setup of clusters Hadoop UCS, saving from manual transactions.

Key advantages of UCS Director Express for Big Data

• Ensuring scalable and reliable deployment of Hadoop on clusters of UCS Big Data.
• Specialized functionality for work with Big Data.
• The centralized control of clusters of Hadoop and physical infrastructure.
• The powerful interface for further integration with services and software tools of third-party producers.
• The big IT maneuverability meaning a greater influence of IT on business. Improvement of business results thanks to acceleration of the analysis of Big Data.

Engineers of Hortonworks and Cisco integrated the solution Cisco UCS Director Express for Big Data with the program Apache Ambari tools, having created the uniform observation post for monitoring of hardware and network resources and the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) platform. Now the organizations can correlate statistics on Hadoop clusters to data on hardware and network resources in a complex to estimate performance and to reveal potential sources of problems. As a result users will quicker detect the reasons of problems capable to affect their possibilities of support of business.

2015

the HSS of UCS Director Express for Big Data Is provided

Unified Computing System (UCS) Director Express for Big Data is a hardware and software system.

The purpose of creation of the UCS Director Express for Big Data complex - simplification of deployment and management of the scalable IT infrastructure processing Big Data^[1].

As a part of a HSS:

• server racks of UCS C240 M4 Rack Servers,
• switches of interconnections of UCS 6200 Fabric Interconnects,
• Software of virtualization of data,
• licenses and technical support services of popular distribution kits for work with distributed system of Hadoop from Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR.

UCS C240 M4 Rack Server server, 2014

UCS 6200 Fabric Interconnects, 2014

Representation of Cisco UCS Director Express, 2014

Record of a webinar "Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) Overview", 2015

2016

Comparison of the IaaS-solution UCS Director and HPE OneView

HPE OneView is fine means of infrastructure management for deployment and configuring of a set of the products HPE. A number of significant improvements is entered to the latest version. At the same time, as stated on the HPE OneView web page, the product only provides "a way to implementation of infrastructure as services". And it becomes obvious if to look at functionality of OneView for orchestration, independent configuring and use of API (see tab. 1).

Most the IT organizations are going to provide a considerable part of functionality of the IaaS-solution to end users. They need the ample opportunities allowing to configure infrastructure and to manage it irrespective of the producer of the hardware. Cisco UCS Director provides IaaS support with a broad spectrum of the equipment both Cisco, and third-party companies. The main appointment of HPE OneView — to provide management for a certain number of the products HPE. In tab. 2 possibilities of configuring and management of UCS Director and HPE OneView for products of different producers are compared.

UCS Director supports various types of infrastructure of different vendors. To create extensive functionality of IaaS, the Cisco company formed partnership and took part in joint developments with many vendors. Tasks and work flows for automation of configuring of all levels of hardware infrastructure, including calculations, network functionality and storage systems are created. There is a possibility of configuring of equipment rooms (bare-metal) of servers, adding of levels of virtualization and usual operating systems. Also configuring of virtual and object (object-based) configurations of storage systems is supported.

HPE OneView is not OpenView

It is not necessary to confuse HPE OneView and a monitoring system of HP OpenView which HPE purchased a few years ago. OpenView was developed as open system (what tells also its name about) and supports not only HPE, but also different servers and network devices of the third-party companies. The HPE OneView system is intended for management of the limited nomenclature of the equipment of HPE. It provides a part of the HPE portfolio including servers, DWH and products of convergent infrastructure. From products of third-party companies OneView supports only the Brocade and Cisco switches.

When your organization, passing to a hybrid cloud, begins to estimate solutions of management IaaS, I strongly recommend to consider advantages of UCS Director. This solution was created for implementation of IaaS on different infrastructures of Cisco and other equipment manufacturers including HPE. UCS Director provides ready functionality of IaaS, providing the reliable platform and the base for an extensive ecosystem which your organization can create, offering hybrid cloud services to end users.

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