Cisco UCS Outperforms HP and IBM Blade Servers on East-West Latency

These days the focus is increasing towards lower latency and high performing server-to-server data traffic (East-West). Cisco claims that they specifically designed their UCS unified fabric for this type of traffic. Cisco want to prove the claim made by their competitors that Cisco UCS unified fabric would increase latency and slow blade-to-blade traffic. Cisco ran the tests, and the results were simply amazing.

According to the recent concluded test by Cisco claims that HP and IBM blade architectures rely on placing networking switches (HP Virtual Connect; IBM Flex System Fabric Switches) inside of every 16 or 14 blade chassis. These legacy vendors imply that data can communicate from one blade to another more efficiently because their networking switches reside within the chassis.  They fail to mention two critical points: Read more………………

A review for CCIE Routing and Switching Certification Guide (4th Edition)

When it comes to CCIE Routing and Switching Written Exam you need to study lots of books especially the titles published from Cisco Press.

As we all know CCIE Routing and Switching is not an easy task, it needs lots of preparation. Since I am in the process of perusing CCIE Routing and Switching I thought of starting my journey with CCIE Routing and Switching Certification Guide ( 4th Edition) published by read more……..

Upgrading ASA 5500 Series firewall, things to be considered – Series 1

When it comes to upgrade an ASA 5500 Series firewall from 8.2 version to 8.3 or so, many things comes into the picture.  Recently we upgraded our ASA 5540 Firewall from the IOS version 8.2.1 to 8.4.6. I would like to share the details about the upgrade.

Stating IOS version 8.3 and later there is pre-requisite related to memory of the ASA. Most of new ASA manufactured after Feb 2010 comes with the upgraded memory. However if your ASA was manufactured before February 2010 you may need to upgrade the memory of the ASA as per the below mentioned table.

* Note:  The maximum memory supported for the ASA-5520 and ASA-5540 is 2 Gb.  If you install 4 Gb of memory in these units, they will go into a boot loop.

The first thing you need is to determine the existing memory your ASA has , which can be done in two ways first by using a command line interface (CLI) do issue a command show version | include RAM …….. Read  more…………………

How to integrate Windows Deployment Services Server with a typical Cisco Networking devices – Series 1

Recently we tried to deploy Windows Deployment Services Server in our environment to enable the deployment of Windows operating systems over the network for our workstations, so that our technical support team do not have to install each operating system directly from a CD or DVD.

Our Windows Deployment Services Server was connected to Cisco Nexus 5000 Series Switch as shown in the below layout. We do have a redundant network devices at each layer but to make things easier I have removed them. Read more………………………