Nobody thought the ‘plumbers’ could succeed in compute …
The numbers are in – across the board Cisco is posting strong results and tracking unprecedented momentum in the server market. With Cisco’s Q3 financial earnings announcement reporting 77% Y/Y growth in Data Center and now the latest IDC Server Tracker results [view UCS Advantage], Cisco is proving to be a formidable force in the compute space. In less than four years after entering a market with very well-established competitors, Cisco has captured the #2 worldwide share position in x86 blade servers*.
The industry has seen businesses shift over 19% of the global x86 blade market to Cisco UCS, and over 28% in the US. In the recent earnings announcement, Cisco reported more than 23,000 unique UCS customers worldwide, representing a customer growth number of 89% Y/Y.
This is not luck …
This is about the value that Cisco is providing our customers. Although we develop products using the same industry standard hardware & software as our competitors, Cisco continues to grow market share. This is attributed Cisco’s unique & innovative approach to providing an open, standards-based data center network architecture and ecosystem that maintains customer choice. We are increasing business value while substantially decreasing the total cost of ownership (TCO). With Cisco Unified Computing System, we are truly evolving the way customers approach the data center, focused on consolidating resources, accelerating server deployment, and simplifying management – flexible and scalable for any workload. It’s that simple.
You hear a lot of buzz words around the industry. But when it comes down to the numbers, Cisco is driving real results for real customers [click to enlarge]:
Here is just some of what we are hearing from our customers: Read More »
While I’ve been writing about Cisco Domain TenSM, I’ve been watching the SDN debate evolve in our industry, and I have to say, I’ve had my concerns. Don’t get me wrong – I personally see SDN as an important and very much required evolution (and note: ‘evolution’ – not ‘revolution’) of the networking industry. Being able to extract more value from the network – through, for example, a consistent and broad network API – I mean, who wouldn’t be excited about that! And especially for us in Cisco, with the largest by far networking installed base, the ability to uncover and exploit additional value for our customers from the network can only be a good thing!
As I say, over the past year or two, I’ve been perturbed about lack of discussion across the industry about the adoption and deployment challenges associated with SDN. There is – bluntly – too much “nirvana” or “marketing promises” out there, too much focus on the end result (e.g. “look at our use case, wow isn’t it great”) without discussion of steps required for a success, and too little discussion on the costs and challenges of the design and implementation of SDN solutions (e.g. “took us X man years + $M of investment”). It’s now time to change the discussion.
I was therefore delighted to see Jim Meltzer’s discussion of the issues he was seeing with his clients regarding SDN.
It’s the end of an action-packed week at Cisco Partner Summit 2013, and if you haven’t had a chance, check out our detailed recaps of Day 1, Day 2 and Day 3.
Join us over the next few days as we highlight the work of our Partner Ambassadors, drill down on the key conversations from throughout Partner Summit, and hear from Cisco executives. But to close out the week, let’s get the view from the top: John Chambers, Cisco Chairman and CEO, offered his takeaways for Cisco partners during an interview with the Cisco Channels social media team.
IT organizations have traditionally designed and built virtualized infrastructures by selecting best of breed components and piecing them together. What’s great about the build your own strategy is it’s incredibly flexible. The challenge is it’s not that easy. It’s just not simple. It takes time, requires people and expertise that you may or may not have, and represents risk should any of the steps not go according to plan.
Hence, an increasing amount of IT organizations prefer deploying integrated infrastructure solutions due to the time it
saves in planning and integration. What Cisco and EMC have done is dramatically reduce the complexity inherent to building your own virtualized infrastructure by releasing several new Cisco solutions for EMC VSPEX. These validated solutions can enable IT to reduce planning, build, and test time, resulting in cost reduction and freed up resources. These solutions are architected with Cisco’s server (Cisco UCS) and networking technology, EMC’s unified storage and backup technology along with the customer’s choice of hypervisor.
Cisco and EMC have worked hand-in-hand not only to ensure VSPEX is rigorously tested, proven and validated by EMC but is also rigorously tested, proven and validated by Cisco.
We have recently released several new Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs) for desktop virtualization as well as VMware and Microsoft virtualized infrastructure solutions. The new designs can be found here.
We also have corresponding solution briefs for each CVD that provide a high level overview of each solution and required components. Below is a table from the solution brief which highlights the component choices for the VMware infrastructure solutions based on 100, 125 and 250 virtual machines.
These new Cisco solutions for EMC VSPEX are just another example of how EMC and Cisco continue to collaborate and offer industry-leading virtual infrastructure solutions that can simplify deployment and improve efficiency. As always, the goal is to enable IT infrastructure to quickly and efficiently respond to the needs of the business.
To learn more about Cisco’s solutions for EMC VSPEX please visit www.cisco.com/go/vspex.
