Zenoss “Business-to-Blade™” Monitoring for Cisco UCS

NEW FLEXIBILITY REQUIRED TO MANAGE DYNAMIC DATACENTERSToday’s dynamic datacenter environments require new levels of flexibility. You must protect rapidly expanding volumes of data, support an increasing number of mission-critical applications and business initiatives, manage highly complex, wildly heterogeneous environments, and meet challenging service level expectations. You must also perform all of these tasks using fewer staff and with smaller budgets than ever.

To keep pace with these demands, a growing number of creative datacenter managers are using solutions that unify their physical and virtual computing, network, storage, and application management infrastructure into a single, cohesive system. Using a single system reduces total cost of ownership and increases your agility and productivity.

Next Generation Datacenter Infrastructures Need Next Generation Management

The legacy tools used in many datacenters were designed for the static datacenter environments of the past. They weren’t built to manage today’s highly scaled, distributed IT assets, and they are too cumbersome and expensive. Some legacy tools have been retrofitted to try and meet the demands of today’s datacenters. However, most of these features were added piecemeal, then dropped on top of a legacy infrastructure with little integration or optimization.

Next generation datacenters need next generation infrastructure and management tools built from the ground up to meet the needs of today’s datacenter environments. The Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and Zenoss Enterprise meet the needs of today’s next-generation datacenters and were built specifically for today’s dynamic datacenter environments.

Cisco UCS: Next Generation Datacenter Infrastructure

The Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) is a next-generation datacenter infrastructure. From inception, it was, designed to give datacenter staff the infrastructure they need for today’s dynamic, scalable, and highly virtualized datacenter environments.

Cisco UCS unifies computing, network, storage access, and virtualization into a cohesive system. With up to 480 blade servers, a single Cisco UCS can host 10,000 virtual machines – all in a single management domain. Cisco’s unified fabric technology reduces costs by eliminating the need for multiple sets of adapters, cables, and switches, and radically reduces the number of devices requiring setup, management, power, cooling, and cabling.

Zenoss Enterprise: Next Generation “Business-to-Blade” UCS Management

Zenoss Enterprise is an “unlegacy”, open source, next-generation datacenter operations management product. It unifies and improves IT service monitoring of key applications, business services, and infrastructures across dynamic, heterogeneous physical and virtual datacenters. The model-driven Zenoss Enterprise management approach uses native Cisco APIs to seamlessly integrate with the Cisco UCS Manager model, then combines Cisco UCS information with additional comprehensive information about non-Cisco physical and virtual devices in the datacenter. Using the unified view Zenoss Enterprise provides you can view application performance metrics for a business-critical application running on a guest virtual computer all the way down to the status of an individual fan running in a Cisco UCS chassis – all without having to jump from tool to tool.

Applications

Virtual Servers

Network

Physical Servers

Storage

Services

Environment Power HVAC

PackagedApps

CustomApps Middleware

Defined in Catalog or Per Customer

EndUserDiscovery &

Configuration

Fault & Event

Performance & Availability

Reporting & Analysis

Alerting & Remediation

Configuration Database &

Model

Key Benefits

The Zenoss Cisco UCS solution delivers the following key benefits:

Unifies Management of Cisco UCS with Other Datacenter Hardware Components

Zenoss unifies management of Cisco UCS with other datacenter hardware components. Zenoss dynamically collects information about Cisco UCS blade, network, storage, and virtual machine host information, as well as information from non-Cisco UCS physical servers and network and storage devices. Zenoss uses an agentless information gathering approach to discover and model each system, and provides a single, accurate view of all physical hardware components. Zenoss allows you to drill down as deeply as you need on individual components when triaging and resolving problems with physical datacenter components.

Unifies Management of Physical and Virtual Environments

Zenoss unifies the monitoring and management of physical and virtual datacenter resources. With Zenoss, datacenter staff are no longer forced to use a variety of separate products with their own disparate user interfaces, processes, and agents. Zenoss automatically discovers, inventories, and categorizes all physical and virtual infrastructure components. This includes not only Cisco UCS components but also all other physical and virtual devices running in the datacenter environment.

Ensures Maximum Benefit from Cisco UCS Hardware

Datacenter staff responsible for managing Cisco UCS must understand all of the different physical and virtual components running on each of the Cisco UCS blade servers. This can be a daunting task, because a single Cisco UCS can support thousands of different datacenter infrastructure components, including blade servers, networking components, and physical and virtual machines. Zenoss Enterprise reports help you identify things like which UCS blades are reaching capacity and which UCS blades still have capacity, so you know which service profiles should be moved where. Zenoss reports can also identify items such as free memory slots on blade servers and which components reside on which Cisco UCS device. You can use this information to quickly understand what your existing Cisco UCS capacity is, how to best use your existing capacity, and how to most cost-effectively increase your capacity.

Cisco UCS and Zenoss Enterprise: Best of Breed “Business-to-Blade” Management

Cisco UCS and Zenoss Enterprise working together provide best-of-breed “business-to-blade” management. Cisco UCS unifies Cisco UCS computing, network, storage, access, and virtualization, and provides a logical view of Cisco UCS hardware service. Zenoss Enterprise provides unified server, network, storage, and virtualization management in heterogeneous environments, as well as a logical view of application and IT services. Their complementary management models work together to simplify datacenter operations, reduce costs, and provide all the capabilities needed to monitor today’s dynamic, next-generation datacenter environments.

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