At the heart of Cisco’s cloud strategy is its Unified Computing System (UCS). At the Cisco Live user conference today, Cisco announced new extensions for the UCS that provide even more density for cloud deployments.
Omar Sultan, solution manager for data center switching in the Data Center Solutions team at Cisco, told InternetNews.com that new UCS improvements are on the networking side as opposed to the processor side. Cisco’s UCS is powered by Intel chips and were recently updated with the Westmere EX launch in April.
The new networking improvements include new virtual interface cards. The new interface technology allows a single 10 Gigabit Ethernet port to look like up to 256 individual machines to a virtualization hypervisors. Previously, Cisco’s virtual NIC only was able to deliver 128 virtual interfaces.
“So you take a single 10 GbE port and present it to look like to 256 virtual PCIe interfaces up to the hypervisor and the OS stack,” Sultan said. “Each virtual machine looks like it has its own network interface.”