Today Imtech ICT announced that it is the first company in the Netherlands which has achieved the Advanced Data Center Architecture Specialization from Cisco.

Cisco Data Center Architecture Specialization tests knowledge in selling, designing, installing, and supporting the Data Center Architecture. This specialization recognizes Data Strategy as having fulfilled the training requirements and program prerequisites to sell, design and deploy comprehensive Cisco Data Center solutions.

With achieving the Cisco Advanced Data Center Architecture Specialization, Imtech ICT has shown that it has the required knowledge to design, supply, implement, maintain and manage the products from the Cisco Datacenter portfolio. It fits the Imtech ICT strategy to integrate various IT infrastructure domains (network, server and storage) into one integral solution. This solution is based on the FlexPod concept, a collaboration with Cisco, NetApp and VMware.

This enables Imtech ICT to support their customers with their issues regarding the data-center, virtualized infrastructures and private- and public- cloud services.

In the past, when I had to design a virtual infrastructure, I had a limited range of server hardware to pick from. Mainly HP and Dell or an occasional IBM server.

But since the beginning of this year I can not bypass Cisco. It is still a bit strange to some people when you mention Cisco with regards to server hardware but it’s a force we can’t ignore anymore.

When Cisco released their UCS server portfolio one and a half/two years ago, nobody thought they would storm the server market as they did. Certainly with their blade server solution they have a very appealing solution which can easily compete with HP, Dell and IBM blade solutions.

Personally I love to configure a Cisco UCS blade solution because it’s so freakin’ easy. One blade enclosure, one switch type, only two management entities and only seven different blade servers. This sounds a bit like a limited solution but trust me the possibilities are endless and performance is great.

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Cisco has been around for years and years on the networking and security side but since a year or so they are a real upcoming player on the server market. Personally I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing Cisco’s Unified Computing Systems first hand and WOW I’m impressed.

On March 23, 2011 (1:00 PM – 2:00 PM GMT) and on March 30, 2011 (2:00 PM - 3:00 PM) Cisco organizes a UCS C-Series – Competitive Update Webinar for you to learn more about the Cisco rack mount server offering.

When you attend this Webinar you will learn about UCS C-Series value proposition and receive an overview and competitive portfolio comparisons. You will also receive guidance on UCS competitive pricing and architectural comparison. Specific areas of focus are management, stateless computing, optimized virtualization, and unified I/O all of which impact TCO.

When you are also interested in Cisco rack mount servers, you can register here.

Last night I received an e-mail from Cisco thanking me for my work in the Nexus 1000V beta program and announcing the availability of the final product.

For those of you that don’t know the Cisco Nexus 1000V, it is a pure software implementation of a Cisco Nexus switch which can be used in vSphere 4. It resides on a server and integrates with the hypervisor to deliver VN-Link virtual machine-aware network services.

Yesterday Cisco revealed more details about their Unified Computing System. The term was announced some time ago but nobody really knew what Cisco was planning. Some people even thought that Cisco was about to take over VMware as we already talked about in this article. Luckily this is not the case and even the opposite is true.

Cisco and VMware join forces in Cisco’s Unified Computing System which will incorporate product engineering and integrated sales and support strategies for datacenter virtualization and unified computing. The resulting combination of the Cisco Unified Computing System with VMware’s virtualization platform will provide customers with access to a unique and powerful virtualized and physical computing system over an intelligent, unified network fabric.

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Today we did our first Hands-on-Lab. Last year these labs were fully booked so we decided to hit the lab early this year.

This lab was based around the Cisco Nexus 1000v virtual switch, which brings back network administration to network administrators.

Erik did the Cisco Nexus 1000v lab today. Since we didn’t receive any beta material yet this is our first real experience with the new virtual switch by Cisco.The switch is based on NX-OS so network administrators can use it just like they configure their other switches.

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After the earlier news that Cisco was enlarging its stake in VMware now the news gets out that Intel sold half of its shares.

Intel disclosed that it had recently sold 1 million shares in the virtualization software maker and plans to sell another 3.75 million VMware shares on the open market. 500.000 of these shares were bought by Cisco. Another 500.000 were bought by EMC, VMware’s mother company.

After the rumors of Intel buying VMware from EMC one has to wonder what the future has in store for VMware. Also Cisco’s membership of Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program and the expansion of shares gives enough to speculate about.

Looking for information about iSCSI, Cisco and VMware I stumbled onto a document which I want to share with all of you. Want to know about vswitches, portgroups, security, ether channels, scalability, security, performance, VLAN tagging, N-port ID virtualization, iSCSI implementations?

In ‘VMware Infrastructure 3 in a Cisco Network Environment‘ all ins and out of VMware networking are described. 90 pages of pure networking wisdom.

Another valueable document I found is the VMware iSCSI Design Considerations and Deployment Guide. When you are designing and /or implementing an iSCSI solution this is a document you should read.