Stretching Cisco Designed Oracle Infrastructures with Low Latency Protocols

Before the pandemic, industries were turned upside down as a digital transformation wave forced IT departments to think of new ways to implement services and address this new business challenge. When business travel starts up again, each of us will see examples: taxi’s replaced by Uber and Lyft; newspapers replaced by a smartphone; radio replaced by Spotify. Each industry struggles to remain relevant. The impact on IT?  The huge growth in applications that draw data from more sources, and the speed to implement required today. Oracle databases and the server infrastructures that support have to support larger workloads without sacrificing performance. The challenge is how to architect these systems to meet uncertain growth requirements yet keep their finance department happy.

Read More: 500-173: Designing the FlexPod Solution (FPDESIGN)

Cisco foresaw this requirement a couple of years ago and invested in a set of Cisco Validated Designs demonstrating the benefits of NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) over Fabrics partnering with Pure Storage initially and more recently with NetApp.

Customers generally fall into two categories:

◉ Those running I/O over ethernet and would more naturally move to RDMA

◉ SAN based customers who desire low latency but within a SAN infrastructure

Cisco has developed a proven solution for each of these two scenarios, see details below.

In 2019, Cisco and Pure Storage tested and validated a FlashStack solution highlighting the benefits of RoCE V2 – Oracle RAC 19c Databases running on Cisco UCS with Pure Storage FlashArray //X90R2 using NVMe-oF RoCE V2 (RoCE  – RDMA over Converged Ethernet version 2). Here the standard FlashStack Converged Infrastructure (depicted below) was set up with NVMe located in the servers and used RoCE to move the data traffic between the servers and the All-Flash storage subsystem.  SLOB (Silly Little Oracle Benchmark) was used to replicate users and the system was scaled to 512 users demonstrating the following benefits:

◉ Lower latency compared to other traditional protocols

◉ Higher IOPS (I/O per second) and scaled linearly

◉ Higher bandwidth to address higher data traffic requirements

◉ Improved protocol efficiency by reducing the “I/O stack”

◉ Lower host CPU utilization, documented at 30% less

◉ Indirectly, as CPU utilization was lowered, more processor cycles are available to process work, therefore fewer Intel processor cores need to be licensed to achieve performance.

This was a welcome design incorporated by many companies from commercial to large enterprise as it addressed a pressing need – how to stretch the IT budget to complete more work on the current system.  The NVMe interface is defined to enable host software to communicate with nonvolatile memory over PCI Express (PCIe). It was designed from the ground up for low-latency solid state media, eliminating many of the bottlenecks seen in the legacy protocols for running enterprise applications. NVMe devices are connected to the PCIe bus inside a server. NVMe-oF extends the high-performance and low-latency benefits of NVMe across network fabrics that connect servers and storage. NVMe-oF takes the lightweight and streamlined NVMe command set, and the more efficient queueing model, and replaces the PCIe transport with alternate transports, like Fibre Channel, RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE v2), TCP.

In 2020, the Pandemic hit.

COVID-19 caused many IT organizations to shift focus from database to remote worker implementations initially conceived as short-term solutions, now moving to longer term designs. Businesses are returning to a focus on stretching their database infrastructure solutions, and Cisco has partnered with NetApp on a new solution to meet this goal.

In April 2021, Cisco and NetApp published a new Cisco Validated Design called FlexPod Datacenter with Oracle 19c RAC Databases on Cisco UCS and NetApp AFF with NVMe/FC. The proven design using NVMe is now proven work with a Fibric Channel twist.

NVMe over Fibre Channel (NVMe/FC) is implemented through the Fibre Channel NVMe (FC-NVMe) standard which is designed to enable NVMe based message commands to transfer data and status information between a host computer and a target storage subsystem over a Fibre Channel network fabric. FC-NVMe simplifies the NVMe command sets into basic FCP instructions. Because Fibre Channel is designed for storage traffic, functionality such as discovery, management and end-to-end qualification of equipment is built into the system.

Almost all high-performance latency sensitive applications and workloads are running on the same underlying transport protocol (FCP) today. Because NVMe/FC and Fibre Channel networks use the same FCP, they can use common hardware components. It’s even possible to use the same switches, cables, and NetApp ONTAP target port to communicate with both protocols at the same time. The ability to use either protocol by itself or both at the same time on the same hardware makes transitioning from FCP to NVMe/FC both simple and seamless.

Large-scale block flash-based storage environments that use Fibre Channel are the most likely to adopt NVMe over FC. FC-NVMe offers the same structure, predictability and reliability characteristics for NVMe-oF that Fibre Channel does for SCSI. Plus, NVMe-oF traffic and traditional SCSI-based traffic can run simultaneously on the same FC fabric.

The design for new FlexPod is depicted below and follows the proven design that has led FlexPod to become a most popular Converged Infrastructure in the market for several years.

The same low latency, high performance benefits of the previous CVD are proven once again in this NVM/FC design.  As such, customers now have a choice as to how to implement a modern SAN to run the heart of their IT shop – the Oracle Database.

Business will continue to challenge their IT departments, some are planned challenges while others are completely unforecasted. Picking a design that can grow to meet these future requirements, where each element in the design can be upgraded independently as circumstances warrant, while meeting performance requirements with an eye toward Oracle licensing costs is the challenge that Cisco’s low latency solutions have met. These are the solutions your organization should take a closer look at for your future Oracle deployments.

Source: cisco.com

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Cisco DNA Spaces helps businesses weather the pandemic

As we wrap 2020, I want to reflect on the year gone by and what it meant for us folks at Cisco DNA Spaces. I think we can all agree that 2020 was a year like no other. It was a time of crisis, it was a period of upheaval; but it was also a period of innovation and transformation for location analytics products.

DNA Spaces is Cisco’s indoor location and IoT services cloud platform.  It enables Cisco Catalyst and Meraki wireless customers to use their existing network to drive digitization within their buildings.

In a world where our websites and mobile apps are becoming smarter by the day, DNA Spaces was launched with the vision to make buildings smarter, for our customers to drive seamless Wi-Fi onboarding for people and IoT devices, for loyalty based differentiated experiences and for behavioral analytics across your business locations.

Prior to Covid-19, we fulfilled our industry’s need for location analytics, behavioral insights, engagement and onboarding tools. In the two years since launch we are the most deployed indoor location services platform in the world, with over 120,000 global business locations on the platform at present. Most customers used the platform to set up Wi-Fi onboarding, engagement rules, locate assets or collect monthly analytics reports and stats on how their locations were performing. Setup DNA Spaces one time and you are all set from an indoor location services perspective.

And then the pandemic hit.

New circumstances require new solutions

Schools and universities closed without notice. Companies went remote overnight. Stores had to close for in-person shopping. Venues had to cancel their events. The Covid-19 crisis was turning out to be most difficult for our customers that operated out of physical locations.

As the state and federal governments started imposing restrictions and social distancing became a survival tactic, everyone woke up to the importance of understanding how people move and interact within buildings—not just in retrospect but in real time. Navigating the global pandemic required enterprises, policymakers and health officials to understand indoor location behavior trends intimately and use those insights to drive safety and compliance.

The product team at Cisco DNA Spaces saw this as an opportunity to help the community adapt for long-term business resiliency. For a product whose mission is to digitize physical spaces, it was clear that if there was ever a moment we could make an impact, it was now.

Pivoting to meet immediate demands

Our team decided to quickly pivot and reprioritize our product roadmap to include apps that would help customers respond to the pandemic and prepare them to safely get back to business. At the heart of our product pivot strategy were our users. We engaged in conversation with them at every step – acknowledged their needs, collected their feedback, understood their point of view.

Any product team will tell you that taking new features to market with a very short runway isn’t exactly an ideal scenario. But we learnt that if your purpose is clear, if your whole team is onboard and if executed well, the experience can be extremely gratifying.

We tapped into some of our core features and repurposed them to build apps more relevant to the new needs created by the pandemic. This resulted in a suite of apps that facilitate a safe return to work in a suite of Back to Business apps and features, including:

◉ Proximity Reporting App for contact tracing based on wi-fi presence

◉ Right Now App for real-time people count and behavioral monitoring on a single pane across your business locations

◉ Density threshold-based triggers for safe capacities and social distancing

◉ Instant Captive Portals for contact-less customer experiences

Smoothing the path to adoption

We built and shipped these apps in the shortest time possible. But our work was far from over. How could we scale adoption at a time when customers were working from home and short on both time and money?

Our adoption strategy was based on two key principles:

1. We ensured that all new features would work with zero support– no training, no long customer meetings and no demo. We wanted it to be possible for customers to sign-up, activate and deploy the new Covid-19 apps in 30 minutes or less. This required heavy focus on simplifying and scaling onboarding, providing in-product guidance and proactively addressing support issues with 24/7 service-level agreements (SLAs).

2. We opened up our tier offerings for everyone as a free trial so customers who hadn’t yet adopted DNA Spaces could get started and do contact tracing, monitor real time occupancy within their buildings and deliver contactless experiences. Every Cisco wireless customer deserved to make their buildings safe for business.

Build it and they will come

Over 300 Cisco enterprise customers deployed the new features across 50,000 business locations in the first 60 days after release, leading to improved management of social distancing in places like retail stores, workspaces, hospitals, universities, malls across the world.

The positive response and validation motivated us to stretch ourselves even further and make our apps ready for Meraki as well.

Countless hours and many sleepless nights went into building and shipping these features but all of our efforts were rewarded when we received the ‘Customer Choice’ recognition on Gartner Peer Insights. To be recognized for the value that DNA Spaces continues to deliver was the icing on the cake. The real reward has been the opportunity to share the journey with our customers and be part of their commitments to caring for their employees, customers and communities.

Looking back, but actually looking ahead

As I look back on 2020 one last time, I see what a tough year it has been for all of us. But I also realize that if we broaden our perspective just a little, life becomes that much easier. That said, I believe that for the product and engineering team at Cisco DNA Spaces, 2020 was a year of courage and shared responsibility. But most of all, 2020 was the year of indoor location services – a year when our product found its true relevance and meaning. We will go into 2021 with all our learnings and I believe, we will all be better for it.

Source: cisco.com

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Using Wi-Fi to Help Manage the Return to the Office

In some locations around the world, buildings that were closed to slow the spread of the coronavirus are beginning to open again — slowly. Fully opening offices will take months. During the process, employers will need to monitor their workspaces closely for social and physical distancing.

A technology we already have can help: Wi-Fi. It is pervasive in our workplaces, and Wi-Fi access points can act as powerful sensors. In particular, we can use location data gathered from Wi-Fi to help manage the re-introduction of workers, customers, and visitors into our facilities.

Our tool for this is Cisco DNA Spaces, a cloud-based system that offers site-specific, location-based analytics for any network using our Catalyst, Aironet, or Meraki wireless access points. Many of our customers already have a license for this product and simply need to turn it on. For others, we offer a 90-day, no-charge trial period to use the tool. Regardless, it should take under half an hour to activate and configure.

We have added applications on to our DNA Spaces platform to provide both real-time and historical analysis tools for businesses that are reopening their offices. The technology is flexible, and the amount of detail collected can be configured by each customer – from collecting anonymous statistical counts to individually identifying people at a site.

Watch Your Workspaces

Let’s look at an example of how the new DNA Spaces applications could help a business re-open its offices to bring people back to the workplace more safely, optionally communicate with specific people as needed, and improve the new workplace over time.

In the first phase of re-opening an office, we’re going to want to bring back a small proportion of employees and track how they use the space. The concern is that even with low population density in a building, people still may be congregating in hot-spots and breaking social and physical distance guidelines. We can use Cisco DNA Spaces’ Right Now app to see if this is happening at a site.

DNA Spaces Right Now shows how many people are using your facilities at the moment.

Traditional data for building occupancy — pulled from access card badge-in records — can tell us how many people enter a building and when, but this data stream doesn’t usually monitor which parts of a building people use, nor when they leave. With Wi-Fi, we can gather much more robust data that tracks how people use, move, and occupy spaces throughout the day.

The Right Now service tracks new devices that enter a space when they connect to Wi-Fi, and by recording which access points are able to electronically “see” them, it can tell which part of the building they are in.

Businesses can use DNA Spaces in a privacy protective, fully anonymized mode (with hashed MAC addresses); in this mode, it does not record any information that could correlate device locations to specific people. It can tell a facilities manager how the workforce in a building is behaving overall, but not the identity of individuals on-site.

You can set density alerts from the Web-based service.

With this data stream, we can watch how behavior changes as we allow more people back into the office over the weeks and months of a return-to-office program. In particular, we can determine if there is an occupancy load at which people start to cluster, breaking general distancing guidelines. If and when this happens, a company can work on reconfiguring hot-spot locations, educating employees, dialing back the number of people allowed into the office, or a combination of mitigations.

Enabling this feature on a network, if it is not already turned on, takes about 30 minutes. It does not require the installation of software on end-user devices.

At Cisco, we have been using DNA Spaces in fully anonymized mode in some of our offices in South Korea and China, after testing in our San Jose buildings. We will have more to say about how these projects are progressing soon.

Data for a Changing Office

Over time, as the return-to-office program gets established, businesses will need to evaluate the new use patterns and the economics of company workplaces. With our Impact Analysis app in DNA Spaces, facilities managers across a business will be able to see how buildings and campuses are being used – not just how much they are being used. We’ll be able to provide reports on time spent in the office, building utilization, and other metrics that could inform how workplaces could get reconfigured. We think these tools will be especially important for buildings that are used by visitors and guests, like stores and schools.

DNA Spaces Impact Analysis shows how building use changes over time.

The applications to monitor building use are available now.

Meanwhile, we are investigating additional capabilities that customers could enable if we offered tracking of not just how devices move around a space in the aggregate, but whose devices they are. This more granular data would let employers contact specific employees and inform them of potential Covid-19 exposure, if necessary. Critically, these features will always be optional, and data collected in a company’s private network will always belong solely to the company that owns the network. DNA Spaces currently does not offer contact tracing to tell precisely who is near whom.

Activating Your Wi-Fi Sensors

We believe using Wi-Fi access points as sensors can provide facilities managers and business leaders with critical information that can help keep people safer, and make spaces more effective and efficient. All our tools are quick to set up, and we are making them available at no charge to all who can use them: Anyone running Cisco or Meraki wireless access points.

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Care and Quality When it Matters Most: IT preparedness for COVID-19

At Cisco, we have asked thousands of our employees around the world to work from home. Most of them came to the office every day. Other companies have also taken this step, and many more will do so soon. We are all motivated by the same things: care for the people we work with, a desire for everyone to stay healthy, and the hope that by preventing community transmission we can shorten this period of disruption.

While our teams are at home, we want to support them in every way we can, which includes helping them be productive in their jobs so they can continue to drive towards their goals. Although we have a strong culture that supports remote work when it makes sense, and amazing technology to enable it, this shift can still be daunting.  At Cisco, we’ve always had business continuity planning and even though the plan exists for shutting down corporate headquarters, it’s never too late to take one more look before everyone leaves the building.  Here are the questions we’ve been asking.  Maybe some of them may help you, too.

Thanks so much, stay healthy, and please let us know how we can help.

Is IT ready to handle a spike in support calls and tickets?

Some employees new to working from home will need help. In addition, regardless of planning, systems may glitch when exposed to multiples of their regular loads. We have to be ready for a spike in IT cases.

There is no easy way to dramatically staff up IT to the extent that might be called for, at least not quickly. Proactive advice to employees is critical. Send notes on how your remote work tools function, and how to set them up. If possible, encourage people to test work-from-home tools, like their VPN software, while they are still in the office.

And remember that people will pull together in a crisis. Your community is a powerful resource. Setting up employees to support each other, via online chat tools, wikis, forums, and email lists can reduce the load on IT.

Is your VPN ready for the load?

If your business has resources behind a corporate firewall, it’s likely that your users will connect to them using a virtual private network (VPN). The VPN concentrator that connects these users to your corporate network may not be configured for the new load of remote users.

It might be time to do a few things to increase your capability to handle an increased load. Obviously, you can acquire more VPN concentrators and get them installed

Check your IP pool. The new load of remote workers could outnumber the IP addresses in the pool reserved for external access. The pool can be increased by your staff.

Employees can be asked to not use their VPN-connected work computers for non-work tasks. During this crisis, it is fair to ask employees to be disciplined in their use of company resources.  You might be shocked at the amount of cat videos streamed through your corporate VPN.  Blocking entertainment sites like Netflix and Hulu could also be a part of this strategy, but honestly, for most of us, asking employees would probably be just as effective and with less conflict.

Companies whose VPNs are configured to handle all traffic from workers’ devices might want to look at enabling split tunneling, where traffic destined for work resources goes over the VPN link, while internet bound traffic does not.  AnyConnect can even selectively split tunnel by whitelisting only IP ranges of trusted sites.  Just a few ranges can have a dramatic effect.  Of course, this would have security ramifications and it’s up to your security team to weigh the risks here.

You can also leverage Cisco’s Umbrella infrastructure to secure your Internet bound traffic instead of pushing more traffic through your VPN and security stack.  It’s remarkably easy to setup and can be done remotely.

Do Call Center Employees have the Teleworker equipment they need?

While many workers get productive by just connecting the laptops to the home ISP and your company VPN, that may not be true for call center employees or anyone with direct communication needs. There are teleworker gateways (including our own products) that will let these workers put their dedicated communications devices online from their homes.

Do you have enough raw network capacity? Do your employees?

Under the work-from-home scenario, network loads shift. Now is a good time to make sure your business’ network links are configured for more traffic. Depending on the types of links you have, it may be a simple and straightforward call to upgrade your committed information rate (CIR). If not, using the tips above to reduce network load might be even more relevant.

At your employees’ homes, ISP capacity may come in to play as well. Many ISPs today are configured to support massive loads to handle video streaming traffic. ISP execs say this traffic peaks at about 8pm every day, so during the lighter workday, there should be ample capacity to handle business networking needs, even video calling. Also, several ISPs are working to eliminate data caps and bandwidth throttling.

It is still possible that the work-from-home transition will tax consumer networks. As one of our IT practitioners says, “As you get further out from the company’s network, things are outside your control.”

Should performance for remote workers suffer, employees should know how to take measures to improve their online experience, especially in collaboration tools like video conferencing. Employees can turn off video during a call (if the software doesn’t adapt automatically to network issues), or even route audio to their phone.

Have you trained your employees in best practices for working remotely?

The nature of work changes when your teams are no longer sitting together. Some employees may be able to get more done, while others will find working from home isolating. More critically, the role of managing changes. Everyone, including people not working from home, will have to allot extra time and energy to staying in touch with the co-workers.

We have a number of remote working tips, including regular community time for all teams as well as a block every day where there’s a video bridge everyone on the team connects to, and people can call in to talk as available, get small things resolved and just catch up. It can be a comfort and social leveling function for everyone in a time of flux.

How can we make sure our teams feel cared for?

Depending on your industry, up to 100% of your teams may soon be working from home, and due to the exponential nature of viral spreads, the situation is likely to outpace traditional planning methodologies. If you do not have a business continuity plan that encompasses this type of crisis, we recommend you quickly address your workers’ technology needs, your internal network, and management policies. Open communication with all constituencies is vital.

And whether it’s as-needed all-hands meetings with the CEO and medical experts, or ramped-up management one-on-ones, it’s important everyone feels cared for during this time. We hosted our first company-wide Q&A session with corporate medical doctors on Covid-19 with just two hours notice and nearly 20,000 attendees. It was an indication of everyone’s hunger for information and connection.

When so much is uncertain and worrisome, I think it’s that much more important to make it possible for people to continue working with their teammates, and still find wins together. With the right management and technology behind them, at least this part of life can remain familiar and comfortable.

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