Cisco UCS 2.0

Recently I attended Cisco’s brisbane partner update of their UCS product. There have been some changes since UCS was first released about 19 months ago (ANZ). I went to the first partner briefing in Sydney early last year and the primary take away was that the Fabric extenders, the 6400’s could only connect to a Nexus product like the 5K or 7K switches. This was due to the Fabric operating native FCoE requiring FCoE aware infrastructure. This meant that customers without 5K or 7K switches were required to also invest in this technology at the same time or prior to moving to UCS.
Its great that Cisco has changed its stance on this with a software release in April using NPIV. Also in smaller environments you can now directly connect FC front end ports of storage to the 6100 Fabric interconnect.

Joining Dimension Data as a Solution Architect

Approximately three months ago I left my old job working as a Technical Architect for Corpnet. Following that I took a contract working in the Queensland Government as a Infrastructure/Storage Engineer. I had planned to stay contracting for at least six months but only lasted about 10 weeks. I only lasted 10 weeks as I was offered an opportunity that I simply couldn’t pass up.

I have accepted the Solutions Architect role at Dimension Data working in the Data Centre Solutions practice. Dimension Data is a household name in the IT industry, an organisation with offices across the world and over 12,000 employees. Headquartered in Johannesburg, Dimension Data were late last year acquired by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT).

I will still continue to blog but it’s likely there be some changes in the future, what they will be is yet to be seen.