We’re at the final day of Microsoft’s Management Summit 2013 (MMS 2013) here in Las Vegas. We’ve handed out ~1,500 t-shirts; performed hundreds of demos on our technologies Nexus 1000V, UCS Manager, VM-FEX, and Cisco PowerTool; evangelized our Microsoft Cloud OS solutions FlexPod and VSPEX; and generally interacted with most of the 5,000+ attendees here.
Show attendees now have a better understanding of our technologies but also and perhaps more importantly, have a better and growing understanding of the true value we bring to their Microsoft oriented data centers.
Figure 1.
As Figure 1 shows, organizations are challenged in many ways – staff inefficiency, unscheduled downtime, OpEx and CapEx pressures, etc. We feel our Cisco Unified Data Center is a viable solution to these challenges. It delivers operational simplicity and business agility -- essential for cloud computing. The Microsoft and Cisco alliance extends the value of the Cisco Unified Data Center by integrating Windows Server, Hyper-V, Microsoft workloads such as SQL and Exchange, and finally System Center and UCS Manager management stacks into manageable and scalable solutions. As a highly secure, scalable environment for your organization the Cisco Unified Data Center automates and simplifies deployment, orchestration, and management across server, network, and cloud.
The value derived from a Cisco Unified Data Center we is that we can now help your data center scale to meet your business dynamics; simplify your I.T. management processes; lower your operating costs while delivering world class performance. In the world of Microsoft oriented data centers, we deliver this value to your organization through:
Cisco Validated Designs for Microsoft Private Cloud Solutions
Move to the cloud quickly and easily with the help of Cisco Validated Designs. Part of the Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track program, these preconfigured solutions consist of industry-leading technologies from Cisco, EMC (VSPEX) and NetApp (FlexPod). Reduce your risk and enjoy end-to-end architectural and deployment guidance with pretested design guides
Cisco Validated Designs for Microsoft Workloads
To ensure Cisco customers running Microsoft software get the most from their data centers, Cisco designs, pretests, validates, and provides support for a growing list of Microsoft solutions such as Microsoft Exchange Server, SQL Server, and SharePoint Server.
Ability to Consolidate and Virtualize Microsoft Applications
Microsoft applications such as SQL Server, SharePoint Server, and Exchange Server are often prime candidates for consolidation and virtualization. Administrators can expedite and simplify virtualization deployment, management, and operations by using Cisco’s high-bandwidth, low-latency, virtualization-aware unified network fabric, Cisco UCS and Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V.
As you can see from the various customer quotes – Xerox, Cassidy Turley, and ING Direct -- true value in terms of economies of scale, improved performance, and efficiencies are seen. To learn more about our Cisco Unified Data Center and its transformational power, please feel free to download our new brochure Microsoft on UCS: Simplify Your IT and Transform Your Business
This is my talk I gave last week at Cloud Connect in Santa Clara. One slide that did not make the deck are the top reasons why people struggle with building private clouds
Management and operations process.
Culture
Funding Model
Service description and self-service interface
As my deck says, “I got 99 problems, but the tech ain’t one”
Self-Service Arrives to Workload Automation. Have Your Users Paint Your Fence.
It’s close to 11 p.m. on the last day of the quarter. And I.T. gets an urgent request to post-pone a closing of the books process because there’s a large order stuck in the CRM system. This means that it won’t hit the books and be recorded as a sale. The customer won’t get her order, the salesperson won’t get paid and finance will show a missing number.
Making matters more complicated, there’s a large marketing workload to process sentiment analysis that kicks off after close of business. That whole workload looks like this:
This generates an urgent call to the team that manages the workload automation platform: Hold the closing workflow! Stop the presses! And postpone the Hadoop workflow.
The admins have to get to their console find the job and pause it. Not a huge deal, except there are thousands of jobs to be run and hundreds of business people calling on a regular basis, at all kind of hours.
Some customers have created help desks for their workload automation teams or even off-shore to serve these kinds of requests.
The Internet of Everything fuels our daily lives, but leads to some new challenges in the networking space. Join us for this week’s episode of Engineers Unplugged as Damian Karlson (@sixfootdad) and Tom Hollingsworth (@networkingnerd) discuss the pros and cons of IPv6, firewalls, and the failure of 1970′s math. Watch and see:
Welcome to Engineers Unplugged, where technologists talk to each other the way they know best, with a whiteboard. The rules are simple:
Episodes will publish weekly (or as close to it as we can manage)
Collaborate 13, the largest independent Oracle user group (IOUG, OAUG, Quest International) event is the launch point for 3 new Oracle-based, Cisco Validated Designs (CVD). With the Joint Cisco/NetApp “FlexPod” as the hardware platform, the new CVD’s include:
Oracle RAC with Oracle Linux as the operating system
Oracle RAC with Oracle VM as the hypervisor
Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne with Oracle Linux as the operating system
These CVD’s, Prevalidated for Oracle, give Oracle RAC and Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne users the option to select a fully tested and supported solution for their infrastructure.
IT users face a difficult series of challenges; do more and do it better, but do it with lower budgets and staff levels. Prevalidated systems, like these three new FlexPod-based CVDs for Oracle software, can help address these challenges.
Cisco and NetApp, working with software companies such as Oracle, are able to give customers a potent weapon to help IT organizations drive down complexity and deliver prevalidated, converged infrastructure capabilities for their mission critical databases and applications. High availability and fast, reliable performance are benefits of converged infrastructure platforms like FlexPod.
