I/O Consolidation in the Data Center: A Complete Guide to Data Center Ethernet and Fibre Channel Over Ethernet 1st Edition

I really enjoyed this book especially the Fibre Channel section. Some of the verbiage is outdated just because the technologies has changed and evolved. Reading this book as part if the CCiE DC reading list.

I'll quote from the book's introduction: "This book is neither a manual, nor a standard, nor a release note, nor a product announcement. This book was written to explain the concepts behind UCS to a large audience, It is not authoritative on anything; please reference the appropriate official documents when evaluating products, designing solutions, or conducting business. The authors do not provide any guarantee of the correctness of the content and are not liable for any mistakes or imprecision."UCS is one of the largest endeavors ever attempted by Cisco. It is a data center computing solution that is not a simple "me too" design, but rather a radical paradigm shift. For our enterprise, UCS is the foundation of our private cloud. If you only desire a very high level view of UCS, cisco.com can give you that and you don't need this book. This book consists of 50% reference material applicable to any server architecture and 50% specific to UCS, The reference material includes updated processor, memory, I/O, and virtualization architectures.There is a CD in the book with a UCS Manager emulator; however, it is not the current version available. For those who have a cisco.com account, you should download the most recent emulation software. It runs as a pre-configured VM in VMware Player. Instructions on the Cisco site are good.Imagine this: you buy hardware, all of your servers are no more than XML configuration files, you have all your data backed up. You have a disaster. You apply your XML configuration files and restore your data. That's it. Business Continuity (DR) made easy and reliable because everything is abstracted from the hardware.

This is poorly written, rambling and disorganized book. I am still not sure who the target audience for this book or what the author was trying to achieve by writing this book. Do not bother buying this book.

I/O Consolidation in the Data Center If you have basic interest in Networking and need a place to start to learn about I/O this book is a great start. Very easy to read but this book still provides the in depth technical knowledge to perform your duties on the job. If you have only worked on the software side monitoring or never set foot in a data center before this book will assist you with best practices. Maybe you have worked in a data center but did not get hands on with I/O this is also a great book to cover things you may or may not have been taught on the job. I highly recommend this book to those who enjoy some scripting, network, or data center management.

A well written book that explains nicely FCOE protocols, data center needs. It is outdated, reading the book in 2015.

This book along with the UCS book make a perfect pair for a solid knowledge of data center networking and Cisco UCS systems.

The consolidation referred to by the book takes place inside a data center, where crucial assumptions can be made about short cabling lengths and the existence of reliable hardware, ie. very low bit rate losses over the distances inside the center. The authors describe briefly existing network choices, like iSCSI and Infiniband. What they advocate is Fibre Channel over Ethernet [FCoE]. This allows for a unified network inside the center, and concomitant savings in hardware and system maintenance.Much of the book is taken up with explaining FCoE, like its architectural models. The details can get somewhat involved, even though the book deliberately omits some information. A major simplifying concept to understand is that FCoE uses encapsulation of a FC payload. With no fragmenting, there is thus no need for reassembly and all that this implies in complexity. [By close analogy, think of what TCP has to do when it reassembles packets.] Which also speeds up FCoE processing, aiding low latency demands.The most intricate descriptions seem to be about combining FCoE with virtualisation. The latter is now a hot topic within data centers, and making this work with FCoE is nontrivial.The book does not claim that FCoE will entirely supplant existing alternatives like iSCSI, but suggests that these might be pushed out to non-data center usages.

good quality

Excellent book if you want the details on converged data and storage in the modern data center.

This book covers lots of details of FCoE, I highly recommend this book to any storage professional who's interested in FCoE technology.