eWEEK Labs’ Top Products Of 2009

Cisco Unified Computing System

With its Unified Computing System, Cisco made a game-changing data centre play – marrying compute, storage and, of course, network resources. Cisco UCS, as I stated in my exclusive October review, combines high-end hardware with integrated management software to create a data centre computing platform capable of hosting high-value applications.

Using two other Products of the Year – Intel’s Xeon 5500 series processors and VMware’s vSphere 4 – Cisco has created a platform that showed some Version 1.0 flaws but that, overall, demonstrated a UCS installation can grow in size without a corresponding increase in management staff or policy complexity.

There is plenty of secret sauce throughout much of the hardware that makes up Cisco UCS. During my tests, I found the biggest dose in the mezzanine card that makes the connection between the UCS blade server and the UCS server chassis. Based on technology Cisco gained when it acquired Nuova, the card is able to multiplex LAN, SAN and management traffic, thereby reducing cabling and management complexity.

From the creation and management of resource pools to the centralised control of change management throughout its high-performance hardware and software components, Cisco UCS exudes excellence based on Cisco’s vast experience in the data centre.

—Cameron Sturdevant

Firefox 3.5

In the past, Mozilla’s Firefox web browser was the standard bearer for users looking for an alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. Firefox stood for quality, openness and strong standards support.

But, during the last couple of years, Firefox has faced new challenges. Emerging competitors, including Google Chrome and Apple Safari, could also lay claim to being innovative, open and, most importantly, a viable alternative to Internet Explorer. Even Microsoft itself released a version of IE that in many ways compared favorably to Firefox.

Firefox was starting to look relatively old and was being perceived as a slow and unstable web browser. So, in some ways, Version 3.5 of the Mozilla browser was one of the most important releases since the very first Firefox. Firefox still isn’t the fastest browser out there, but with Version 3.5 Mozilla has gone a long way toward improving the speed and stability of the browser. Standards support has also been boosted, including enhanced support for HTML 5.

Significantly, Firefox 3.5 offers one of the first and best browser implementations of offline support and desktop integration. These are key features that point toward the future of the web, where web-based applications can also offer many of the benefits of desktop apps.

—Jim Rapoza

‘Nehalem’ Family of Processors

I reviewed many servers this year based on the Intel Xeon 5500 processor family, otherwise known as Nehalem.

In fairness, AMD server processors have had a memory architecture similar to the one the energy-saving, virtual-machine-enhancing, front-side-bus-dumping, hyperthread-reintroducing Nehalem processors support. Even so, the Intel microarchitecture and CPU hardware were at the heart of some of the most important announcements of 2009 – including VMware’s vSphere 4 and Cisco’s Unified Computing System.

In my original analysis of the Nehalem release, I noted that the processor family’s integrated memory controller, additional memory channel and other performance-enhancing improvements would enable Xeon 5500-series-equipped systems to consolidate even more virtual machines onto fewer physical systems. I also noted that, as implementation of the Xeon 5500 series CPU family spreads, IT managers should take another look at applications that did not perform well when run on VMs hosted on previous-generation Intel-based servers.

In addition, Nehalem processors use a significant update dubbed VT-d (Virtualisation Technology for Directed I/O) that connects dedicated DMA (direct memory access)-capable I/O resources for virtual machines. One of the big challenges of virtualisation has been handling I/O, and VT-d allows the direct assignment of a VM to a physical device. VT-d is designed to reduce the performance overhead incurred as the hypervisor moderates state among the guest VMs.

IT managers will need to be mindful that new hardware components – including NICs and memory configurations – aimed at improving VM performance will also drive up the initial hardware price of Xeon 5500-based systems. But the wide-scale adoption of the Intel Xeon 5500 series (by server makers Dell, HP, Lenovo and Apple, among others), combined with the significant capability changes made to the processor, marked an IT milestone in 2009.

—Cameron Sturdevant