Cisco new data Center for disaster recovery and application development

Cisco opened a new data center this week at the North Carolina State Triangle Science Park. This datacenter has a dual mission: http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/13521.html "> Application development and Disaster recovery as Cisco's production data center in Texas."

The 2.8-megawatt, 18,500-square-foot modified data center is a two-storey facility, meaning it is not as flexible as a single layer of equipment. According to Cisco, the data center is highly efficient, with an efficiency of 1.4, while Cisco's power efficiency at Texas Allen's data center is 1.34, and the efficiency of electricity usage at Richardson's facility is 1.9%. The two data centers are the new RTP1 facility and will be backed up first.

Cisco's it official, Jimcribari, says Cisco plans to let RTP1 be a production backup for other Cisco global data centers. It also showcases Cisco's technology and customer implementation techniques, and proves that they do not need separate physical facilities for disaster recovery.

Cribari says it shows customers how to maximize their investment in disaster recovery and application development environments.

RTP1 is Cisco's oldest building in the Triangle Technology Park. As a data center, it can hold 438 racks, which can place 5000 unified computing blade servers and 125,000 virtual machines, with a power consumption of 6.5 kilowatts per rack. The data center uses both air and cold water cooling methods. While using air to cool this facility, the "Water Side Energy saver" allows the mechanical cooler to stop cycling.

RTP1 also uses a reinforced floor, not a living floor. All cables and other wires and services are in the overhead channel.

It is not surprising that backup capabilities are basic functions in Cisco Unified Computing systems and Nexus switches and NetApp Snapmanager mirroring and replication software. The service configuration defined in the Unified Computing system server can effectively simulate the workload of this datacenter, while the virtual Routing and forwarding (VRF) capabilities of the Nexus switch mimic the infrastructure of the primary data center.

A service configuration is a defined, set, and enforced property of an application or virtual machine that tracks the migration of that virtual machine across the enterprise. VRF allows multiple instances in one routing table to coexist in the same router at the same time. Snapmanager perform backup, recovery, and disaster recovery operations for virtualized servers in NetApp storage systems.

Together, these three components allow RTP1 to be a disaster recovery center based on a "virtual datacenter" created in a physical datacenter. Cisco says it can act as a disaster-recovery site for multiple production data centers by defining a subset of applications based on the importance of the enterprise.

The RTP1 accommodates a cluster of 40 unified computing platform Blade servers, supporting 800 to 1000 virtual machines. These virtual machines accommodate a predefined service configuration to back up a data center site. All unified computing systems are connected to the Nexus6100 switch on the rack by Cisco's "Unified Architecture" architecture. These switches are then connected to the Nexus7000 switch in the network trunk. The Nexus switch also connects Fibre Channel communication to the storage structure.

This Texas data center runs 1300 production applications, but not all applications can be backed up at the same time. Cisco's IT department defines four categories of importance for its applications, accommodating the most important and then critical applications, depending on capacity. Cisco's data center has been in operation since September 13.