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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

February 9, 2021

DATA CENTER

Choosing to modernize your infrastructure isn’t just about TCO

3 min read

Modernizing is about doing things differently in how you operate, manage, and consume your IT infrastructure. This blog discusses why you should modernize to meet your performance, flexibility, and agility business goals.

November 12, 2020

DATA CENTER

Beyond the world-record benchmarks: How Cisco UCS performance drives business results

1 min read

Geographic Solutions provides a timely example of how well servers perform in the real world, and how capable they are in supporting continually changing business needs. And they did it on Cisco UCS servers.

September 23, 2020

DATA CENTER

Cisco Intersight + Hitachi storage: Now integrated for better orchestration of storage and virtual environments

1 min read

As we continue to create new extensions and value for Cisco Intersight, I’m pleased to announce a Tech Preview of our latest integration with Hitachi. This integration helps simplify and automate the orchestration of data centers leveraging Hitachi storage and underlying VMware datastores. A SaaS management platform, Intersight helps eliminate operational siloes and provides visibility, […]

April 2, 2019

DATA CENTER

Server Speed and Capacity for Business Application Demands

2 min read

Servers exist to run applications that solve business, technical, and scientific problems. Some applications will benefit from clock speed improvements while others will see benefits from additional memory.

October 30, 2018

DATA CENTER

New Memory for Improved Server Capacity and Performance

2 min read

What if there was a way to supersize your server memory capacity? Even better, what if that memory was not only fast, but persistent? Read on to learn about how you can get more performance out of your storage and RAM.

September 18, 2018

DATA CENTER

In case you missed it, the Cisco UCS C4200 Multinode Server

1 min read

On May 31st, Cisco announced the C4200 Multinode Chassis and C125 M5 server. Some of you may have been taking that week off due to Memorial Day. And I bet even more of you had the temerity to take a nice summer vacation and didn’t notice our new server. So I wanted to write another blog to catch everyone up about the C4200.

September 10, 2018

DATA CENTER

Cisco UCS 480 ML M5 Server – Performance and Capacity for AI

4 min read

The C480 ML M5 rack server supports eight NVIDIA V100 GPUs with their NVLink technology. The NVIDIA Tesla V100 is the world’s first GPU to break the 100 teraflops barrier of deep learning performance with a whopping 640 Tensor Cores.

August 15, 2018

DATA CENTER

Fast & Flexible – New 4th Gen Fabric Interconnect and VIC

3 min read

  Today, guest blogger Nikul Sheth, Sr. Product Manager for Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnect writes about our new 4th gen fabric. Our next evolution of Cisco UCS Fabric provides...

June 20, 2018

DATA CENTER

Scaling to PB within Minutes – The Road to Full Automation for Scale-Out Storage with Cisco UCS

4 min read

Building Scale-Out Storage solutions can be now fully automated to reduce the overall amount of work and to easily scale software-defined storage environments within minutes. Partners and customers can begin to leverage this capability using Ansible modules and playbooks for UCS Manager.

May 31, 2018

DATA CENTER

Cisco UCS C4200 multinode rack server deeper dive

3 min read

Other server vendors offer multinode servers, only Cisco offers you a system: UCS is a fabric-centric architecture with a centralized management model, manageable with a single tool, Cisco Intersight.

March 6, 2018

DATA CENTER

Cisco UCS – Helping You Laugh All the Way to the Bank

1 min read

How much could you save by switching to Cisco UCS? Our Public TCO Tool can give you guidance.

August 3, 2017

DATA CENTER

Scaling Networks Automatically with ACI

2 min read

Many of you know Lauren Malhoit our incredible co-host of TechWiseTV. She asked for my help getting this blog out and who am...

July 28, 2017

DATA CENTER

It’s OK to be fashionably late when you bring 3 more Cisco UCS world records

1 min read

When we announced our new M5 servers, we posted six new world record benchmarks. This late last week received confirmation of three more world records.     SPECjBB®2015 MultijVM – #1 4-socket server result for critical-jOPS. The Cisco UCS C480 M5 delivered 229,029 – a 78% increase when compared to Cisco’s previous result #1 result.1 […]

July 13, 2017

DATA CENTER

Cisco UCS M5 C-Series Rack Servers – Evolution and Revolution

2 min read

Tuesday we announced our fifth generation of Cisco UCS servers. Today, I want to take a deeper look at the M5 rack servers. If you are interested in our new blade offerings, check out my blog from yesterday. We put our hard drive sleds on a diet and the C220 M5 bulked up. Customers asked […]

July 12, 2017

DATA CENTER

More of everything you love with Cisco UCS M5 Blade Servers

2 min read

Yesterday we announced our fifth generation of UCS servers. Today I want to take a deeper look at the M5 blade servers. Tomorrow, I’ll tackle the M5 rack servers. More! More! More! The B200 M5 Blade Server has more of everything you love. More cores, more memory, more GPUs. Based on the Intel® Xeon® Scalable […]

July 11, 2017

DATA CENTER

Cisco UCS continues its world record tradition!

3 min read

Contributing author: Vijay Durairaj Today we are announcing our latest generation of UCS servers based on the Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor family and 6 industry standard world record benchmarks. Since Cisco first entered the server business, we’ve been setting records and our new M5 servers are no exception. For details on the new Cisco UCS M5 […]

April 17, 2017

DATA CENTER

Cisco HyperFlex vs. Public Cloud

5 min read

Late last year, I compared Cisco’s S3260 Storage Server to Amazon’s S3 service. The results shocked a lot of people and spurred a lot comments on the blog.

November 9, 2016

DATA CENTER

Do you need more storage but fewer servers?

1 min read

Last week, I discussed the economics of on-premises storage using the S3260 Storage Server vs. the cloud. Net net, the S3260 is 56% less expensive. Today, I wanted to talk about server consolidation of multiple 2RU rackmount servers on to a S3260. Yes, I’m going to try and sell you fewer servers. 2RU rackmount server […]

November 1, 2016

DATA CENTER

Understanding the Cost Premium of Public Cloud for Active Data

2 min read

If you’ve read any of my past blogs, you’ll know I focus a lot on the economic impact of Cisco UCS. Today I’m comparing the TCO of hosting data intensive workloads on-prem vs. in the public cloud. What started out as a 2RU rackmount consolidation discussion (more on that next week) turned into a public cloud […]

May 6, 2016

DATA CENTER

Video Transcoding with the Intel Xeon E3-1285L v4 Processor

1 min read

Intel® recently released a white paper on FFmpeg Linux transcoding performance with Intel Quick Sync Video using the Intel Media Server Studio on the Intel Xeon® E3-1285L v4 processor.

April 1, 2016

DATA CENTER

Processor Updates to UCS Mini and M-Series

1 min read

Yesterday, Girish blogged about the new Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 v4 product family and Cisco’s world record benchmark performance. Today, I want to update you on the changes to UCS Mini and our M-Series Modular Servers.

March 9, 2016

DATA CENTER

UCS Mini with StorMagic SvSAN

1 min read

Do you need a server and storage solution for your remote sites, to ensure that your business critical applications are always available? Cisco and StorMagic have a solution for you.

February 3, 2016

DATA CENTER

Cool Updates to UCS Mini and M-Series

1 min read

Tuesday Girish blogged about the new UCS Innovations and at the end of this post there is a list of other blogs with more details on other updates. Today I’ll go a bit more in-depth on what’s new for UCS Mini & M-Series Modular Servers.  

December 7, 2015

DATA CENTER

UCS M-Series and Citrix XenApp Bare Metal Deployments

1 min read

If you are one of the 330,000 organizations using Citrix XenApp (or if you are considering it) you need to consider Cisco’s UCS M-Series modular servers. What are M-Series modular servers? M-Series servers are composable infrastructure that disaggregates storage and networking from the CPU/memory complex allowing workloads to be optimally matched to resources. An ideal […]

November 2, 2015

DATA CENTER

Cisco UCS Mini Customer Success Stories

2 min read

When we launched UCS Mini, it pushed us into new territory with an exciting offering that bundles servers, storage and networking into a single solution — much like the traditional UCS — but in a smaller form factor and lowered the cost of entry to a UCS solution. It allows customers of any size (SMB, […]

August 11, 2015

DATA CENTER

Latest additions to the Cisco UCS M-Series Modular Server Portfolio

1 min read

Cisco UCS M-Series Modular Servers deliver exceptional value for online content delivery like gaming, web serving, transcoding, and HPC. Built around Cisco’s virtual interface card (VIC) technology and the policy-based management of UCS Manager, this new design brings the award-winning architecture and management of Cisco Unified Computing to the world of parallelized workloads.

June 5, 2015

DATA CENTER

Find and Fix Problems Faster with New Splunk Integration for Cisco UCS

2 min read

IT infrastructures are increasingly complex and include a broad range of technologies and platforms hosted in physical, virtual and cloud environments. Cisco UCS has become a world leading server platform in large part because the unique UCS architecture enables organization to harness the power of virtualization and dramatically simplify infrastructure management. Splunk is a great […]

April 14, 2015

DATA CENTER

Cisco UCS Mini for SAP and SAP HANA

1 min read

On the way to tradeshow week (May 4th), I decided to do a brief blog series on UCS Mini tied to these shows. Last week was Microsoft Ignite. This week SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference in Orlando and the discussion of UCS Mini for SAP and SAP HANA.

April 9, 2015

DATA CENTER

Cisco UCS Mini Finalist for Best of Interop Awards 2015

2 min read

When we launched UCS Mini back in September, it pushed us into new territory with an exciting offering that bundles servers, storage and networking into a single solution — much like the traditional UCS — but in a smaller form factor. It also allowed Cisco to effectively target branch or remote offices and the mid-market with […]

May 6, 2015

DATA CENTER

Cisco UCS Mini and Citrix Desktop Virtualization

1 min read

This week, Cisco is at three industry tradeshows (Microsoft Ignite booth #122, SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference booth #330, and EMC World booth #221). Next week is Citrix Synergy in Orlando.

April 21, 2015

DATA CENTER

Cisco UCS Mini and EMC Storage

1 min read

On the way to tradeshow week (May 4th), I decided to do a brief blog series on UCS Mini tied to these shows. I’ve covered Microsoft Ignite and SAPPHIRE NOW in the past two weeks. Last up, EMC World in Las Vegas.

April 7, 2015

DATA CENTER

Cisco UCS Mini – Powering Microsoft Applications

1 min read

Since Cisco UCS Mini launched last September, Cisco and our partners (Citrix, EMC, Microsoft, NetApp, Nimble Storage, Oracle, SAP, and VMware) have been hard at work putting together a wide variety of solutions. On the way to tradeshow week (May 4th), I’ll be doing a brief blog series on UCS Mini tied to these shows.

February 20, 2015

DATA CENTER

Cisco UCS Manager Plug-In for Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c

1 min read

Cisco is pleased to announce the latest version of the UCS Manager Plug-In for Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c (OEM).  This new version (12.1.0.9.0) is posted on the Cisco Communities website. The plug-in provides health monitoring and status checking.

February 9, 2015

DATA CENTER

Cisco Voted Top Platinum Sponsor – JDE Summit 2015

1 min read

The JD Edwards Summit brings together over 700 business partners from around the world for a week of product updates, industry discussions and intense training.  A number of vendors were asked to present solutions that are specific to this customer base.  Cisco and Nimble Storage presented the UCS Mini based SmartStack solution where the entry […]

December 18, 2014

DATA CENTER

Cisco UCS Mini Wins infoTECH Spotlight Award

1 min read

Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC) announced the winners of the 2014 infoTECH Spotlight Data Center Excellence Awards today. Cisco is honored that UCS Mini is one of the recipients! To quote from the TMC press release: “The 2014 infoTECH Spotlight Data Center Excellence Award recognizes the most innovative and enterprising data center vendors who offer infrastructure […]

December 16, 2014

DATA CENTER

The Economic Impact of a VersaStack Solution

1 min read

I’ve written a number of blogs on the economic value of Cisco UCS and how it is changing the economics of the datacenter. Now, for the first time we performed a TCO comparison of our new VersaStack solution and how it stacks up versus the competition. The VersaStack solution combines the innovation of Cisco UCS […]