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Bill Shields

Senior Marketing Manager

Product and Solutions Marketing Team

Bill joined the Cisco family in November 2010 as a Marketing Manager on the Cisco UCS Product Marketing team. Now a Sr. Marketing Manager, his duties include managing the development Cisco’s UCS TCO/ROI tools; providing sales team and partner tool support; server competitive analysis and positioning; is the marketing manager for UCS X-Series Modular Servers, UCS B-Series Blade Servers, UCS C-Series Rack Servers, UCS S-Series Storage Servers, and UCS Mini. Additionally, he provides support for Intersight Infrastructure Service.

Prior to joining Cisco, Bill was previously with Hewlett-Packard in a number of roles including almost seven years in server options marketing and ProLiant Essentials Software training development and delivery.

Bill’s certifications include a Six Sigma Green Belt (CSSGB) from the American Society for Quality and Project Management Professional (PMP) from the Project Management Institute. He earned his MBA in Marketing from the University of Houston.

Articles

August 17, 2022

DATA CENTER

Server deployment done right – Cisco UCS X-Series with Intersight

2 min read

Whether it is a new VDI environment to enable remote work or being able to decommission older, slower, more power-hungry servers, a new server provides no business benefits until it is deployed and in production.

August 24, 2022

DATA CENTER

VDI to GPU Accelerated VDI – Cisco UCS X-Series with X-Fabric Technology

2 min read

VDI users with accelerated, GPU enhanced desktops will have a better experience and be more productive. Adding GPUs to modular, blade servers has never been simpler or quicker. X-Series protects and extends your investment with a modular form factor. You can upgrade only the components that add benefit to your business be it the CPU/server, I/O, or GPUs.

June 7, 2022

DATA CENTER

Modernize Workloads with Cisco UCS X-Series And Red Hat OpenShift

3 min read

With an emphasis on keeping apps running, we are helping customers and partners to be ALL IN this year at Cisco Live, working with you to solve some of your biggest IT challenges.

April 27, 2022

DATA CENTER

Cisco UCS X-Series modular design makes adding GPUs easy

2 min read

Cisco believes you shouldn’t have to create hardware silos to meet the needs of an application and provide your users the best experience. Now with Cisco UCS X-Fabric Technology and GPU announcements, we are expanding the portfolio to address a much wider range of capabilities to tackle the most demanding of applications while offering the modularity needed to face future demands without compromise.

April 20, 2022

DATA CENTER

Cisco UCS Unified Fabric now 100Gb end-to-end for X-Series

3 min read

Since 2009, Cisco UCS Unified Fabric—with data, storage, and management traffic on a single cable—has been a key differentiator for UCS servers in the industry. This simplified server and networking infrastructure now becomes a low latency, end-to-end solution for your applications and user experience.

April 13, 2022

DATA CENTER

Expanding workloads for UCS X-Series with UCS X-Fabric Technology

2 min read

We describe X-Series as having the density and efficiency of blade servers with the expandability of rack servers. First, we increased the amount of storage – going from two drives on a B-Series to six drives on a X-Series. Now we are adding GPUs to X-Series that were previously only available in rack servers.

December 10, 2021

DATA CENTER

UCS X-Series unboxes two CRN Awards

1 min read

Cisco receives two awards from CRN. UCS X-Series has become the fasting ramping UCS server for Cisco. Our customers are choosing UCS X-Series because they really appreciate the modular design that allows them to future proof their environment for the next decade and the Intersight operating model.

November 10, 2021

DATA CENTER

UCS X-Series – Computing for the next decade

2 min read

Cisco UCS X-Series offer the flexibility to support modern, traditional enterprise, and scale-out apps, helping IT teams gain agility and better respond to dynamic business requirements.

November 3, 2021

DATA CENTER

Do more today, save money tomorrow with UCS X-Series

4 min read

I’ve been working on Cisco UCS TCO/ROI for almost 12 years. The results have remained remarkably consistent, and I’d like to share what I’ve learned over the last decade plus.

October 27, 2021

DATA CENTER

The advantage of partnerships – Cisco UCS X-Series Solutions

3 min read

Cisco has always partnered with industry leaders to deliver best of breed solutions as well as flexibility and choice. With the introduction of UCS X-Series, we have again partnered with industry leaders to deliver innovative solutions with our converged infrastructure and data protection partners.

October 19, 2021

DATA CENTER

Cisco UCS X-Series achieves 35 million IOPS performance in a single chassis

3 min read

Modern enterprise computing workloads are adapting to a hyper-distributed and hyper-connected world where apps, devices, and data can be accessed anywhere and anytime. In turn, advancements in application architectures made it possible to deliver workloads in a variety of ways including as microservices wrapped in containers and virtual machines.

October 20, 2021

DATA CENTER

Cisco UCS X-Series powers modern applications

4 min read

we designed the Cisco UCS X-Series with the flexibility to support a wider range of applications. Previously, you might have used blade servers and rack servers depending upon the need for local storage or expansion cards. Now, a single system blurs those lines, Cisco UCS X-Series. This means that fewer system types can do the job, helping you avoid the cost and complexity of unique infrastructure.

October 13, 2021

DATA CENTER

Modernize Everything – Cisco UCS X-Series and Cisco Intersight

3 min read

When evaluating servers for your next project, at the edge, in the data center, or someplace in between, you should also evaluate how they are managed and what else that management platform has to offer.

October 6, 2021

DATA CENTER

X marks the spot – Cisco UCS X-Fabric Technology

2 min read

Cisco UCS X Fabric Technology is the second fabric in X-Series, named for its versatility and flexibility. While Unified Fabric is Ethernet-based, UCS X-Fabric blurs the lines between rack and blade servers. It allows you to compose system policies in Cisco Intersight and enables hybrid cloud services such as Intersight Workload Optimizer, Intersight Cloud Orchestrator, and AppDynamics.

September 29, 2021

DATA CENTER

UCS X-Series Intelligent Fabric Modules deliver simplicity and performance

2 min read

One of UCS’ biggest benefits has always been Unified Fabric. That is carrying data, storage, and management traffic over a single wire. The IFM combined with Cisco VICs deliver Unified Fabric. Reducing the number of cables per server (CapEx and OpEx considerations but TCO will be in a future blog) while being able to deliver the right amount and type of bandwidth to the server depending on the application is the hallmark of UCS. With the IFM, UCS X-Series ensures fast and secure delivery of packages (data).

September 22, 2021

DATA CENTER

The power of possibilities – Cisco UCS X210c M6 Compute Node

2 min read

Cisco UCS X-Series was designed to be modular, expandable, and blur the lines between blade and rack servers. It all starts with the Cisco UCS X210c Compute Node.

September 15, 2021

DATA CENTER

The power of innovation– Cisco UCS X9508 Chassis

3 min read

The Cisco UCS X-Series begins with the Cisco UCS X9508 Chassis. Our engineering teams rethought everything: modularity, size, power, cooling, and fabrics. The result is a great infrastructure choice to base your hybrid cloud computing platform for the next decade.

September 8, 2021

DATA CENTER

UCS X-Series: Unbox the future today

2 min read

Cisco announced the UCS X-Series in June. But I know how hard it is to keep up with industry news, so I thought a blog series was a good way to familiarize / refamiliarize you with our next gen modular system.