© 2014 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 1

Uncover the Business Impact of Application Acceleration with Solid-State Systems

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Benefits of Cisco Unified Computing SystemInnovation serving 30,000 UCS Customers World Wide

Sources: Cisco UCS Changing the Economics of the Datacenter, Customer Case Studies, Cisco UCS Performance Benchmarks

Superior Economics and Operations Superior Performance

82World-Record

Application Performance Benchmarks

54%

Reduction of Power and

Cooling Costs

61%

Reduction of Ongoing

Management Costs

77%

Reduction of Cabling

84%

Reduction in Provisioning

Times

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UCS Founding Principles

Cisco Unified Computing System

Servers

UCSNetwork / Storage Access

ApplicationCentricity

OperationalSimplicity

Platform for IT Innovation

© 2014 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 4

UCS Founding Principles

Introducing the Cisco UCS Invicta Series

Servers

Flash Memory

UCSNetwork / Storage Access

NEXT GEN UNIFIED COMPUTINGIntegration of Solid-State Memory Systems into the UCS Fabric

UCS Invicta Series Solid-State Systems

ApplicationCentricity

OperationalSimplicity

Platform for IT Innovation

Address new data velocity and scale

requirements

Integrate application acceleration into the computing domain

Making Leaders Successful Every Day

Storage Media Types

SATAHDD

7200 RPM

FATAHDD

10K RPMTape Optical

SAS/FCHDD

10K RPM

SAS/FCHDD

15K RPM

FlashSSD

DRAMSSD

HighcostLow density

High performance

LowcostHigh density

Low performance

© 2014 Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

Storage Technology Adoption In Enterprise Verticals

© 2014 Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

August 2013 “Build Your Business Case For All-Flash Storage Arrays”

Compare The Cost Of SSD Performance To Hard-Drive Performance

© 2014 Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

Flash Storage 1.0: Less Is More

Hybrid arrays• Rely on caching and tiering to accelerate storage workloads

• Vendors recommended 2-5% flash capacity to provide 4-6X performance boost

Host based flash (i.e. PCIe Flash Cards)• Placed flash storage close to CPU resources

• Limited scalability

• Data protection concerns

BUT DOES A LITTLE GO A LONG WAY?

© 2014 Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

Flash Storage 2.0: More Is More

Performance sensitive buyers• Look at deployment in terms of business value

• High performance increases productivity

• Simplifies architecture by eliminating storage bottlenecks

• Key markets: Analytics, Developers, SLA sensitive workloads

Price sensitive buyers• Replace midrange disk storage with flash arrays to boost efficiency

• Mindful of facilities costs and want enterprise storage features

• Key markets: Virtualization, Service Providers

FLASH CAN BE TRANSFORMATIVE

© 2014 Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited 11

Business Benefits For Flash Arrays

Applications

Increased transaction

output

Reduced latency

User productivity

Workers’ time saved

Cost avoidance for additional staff

Compliance

Avoid SLA penalties and

fines

Avoid unplanned upgrades

Business decision support

Faster insights

Ability to run additional analytics

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Cisco UCS Invicta Series

Up to 1.2 Million IOPS*Up to 12 GB/s BandwidthUp to 240 TB Raw

Using Invicta OS 5.0

UCS Invicta Appliance

UCS InvictaScaling System

Scalability

Modularity

Application Acceleration

Data Optimization

Multiple Workloads

Tuning-Free Performance

250,000 IOPS1.6 GB/s* BandwidthUp to 24 TB Raw

Flash Usage at AOLDan Pollack – Chief ArchitectStorage Operations

Initial Flash Use at AOL – Database SLA

14

Problem meeting billing SLA• Over time workload was added to a reporting database• Eventually a critical billing database with a strict SLA was added• Load was originally OK but eventually SLA was only met about

half of the time• Is it a storage problem?

Initial Flash Use at AOL – Database SLA

15

It isn’t a storage problem but is there anything you can do?• Try flash• IO latency becomes uniform and mostly small – Less than 1ms• SLA now met 100% of the time• Can we keep it until we figure out what to tune in the database?

Flash is the New High Tier

16

Flash ROI is better than disk at AOL• $/GB doesn’t tell the right story• Flash arrays 10-15% lower lifetime cost

People are required to fix performance problems• Immediate solution• Time for analysis• Removes SLA pressure

Storage virtualization enables migration of workloads• Move the poor performing devices to Flash tier• Online migration of workload by a single admin

What’s Next for Flash at AOL

17

• Flash high tier storage rollout complete by 2015 – 2PB now growing to about 4PB

• All disk based arrays are for low IOPs capacity only• Flash moves down the stack as cost drops

Cisco Confidential 18

UCS Director

UCS DIRECTOR SOLVES INFRASTRUCTURE CHALLENGES

Manual processes require days or weeks to deploy resources;

increases operating costs

Data center teams stay in rigid silos, with complex hand-offs between domains and teams

Static resource allocation results in under-utilization of

resources and inefficiency

Reduces resource deployment from weeks to minutes

Allows IT teams to work together; encourages teamwork resulting in competitive innovation

Delivers unified automation and management for optimum utilization and efficiencies

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Managing Compute and Solid-State Resources in a Unified Fabric

Mixed DensityRacks/Blades

UCS Director

Fabric Interconnects

Batch, Data LoadsPerformance Nodes

Routers

Stateless UCS Servers with Virtualized

Adapters

Workload Acceleration and Data Reduction

Nodes

Virtual Desktops

Email

Data Reduction Nodes

OLTP

Analytics

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Thank you.