I have lost count of the number of trade shows I’ve worked over my career. But working trade shows for Cisco over the past 14 months has been a uniquely positive experience. Microsoft TechEd North America 2013 makes my 5^th show evangelizing Cisco UCS and our solutions.

I have been able to have long (sometimes up to 45 minutes) conversations with potential customers who have heard about UCS and want to learn more. Their reactions on how Cisco does it differently from others in the industry is an eye-opener for them – whether it the technology or the economics of the solution. They all walk away saying they are going to have to dig deeper into our solutions and contact their account team / partner.

It has become almost embarrassing the amount of praise our current customers heap on us when they come by the booth. Embarrassing because I’m just a very small part of what makes UCS successful; Cisco has a very strong team behind UCS and I wish they all could hear the great things the customers are saying about their experiences.

There are still two days left to stop by the Cisco booth and learn about:

Tags: email, Exchange, FlexPod, Nexus 1000v, security, SQL, UCS, UCS Manager, VM-FEX, vspex

Guest post by Adrian Simays, Director of Technical Enablement for Microsoft at EMC Corporation.

It’s a great week in New Orleans….great food, awesome Jazz, funky hats…and a powerful partnership with Cisco.  And the week is getting even better.…at Microsoft TechEd, EMC announced the latest VSPEX solutions for Microsoft.

So what is the big news?  We announced the expansion of the VSPEX portfolio to include support for Exchange 2013 and SharePoint 2013.  This announcement extends the VSPEX support for SQL Server we announced at Microsoft Management Summit in April.  VSPEX provides infrastructure for customers looking to gain the benefits of converged infrastructures, leveraging EMC storage systems and next-generation backup products, while at the same time gaining more choice in individual stack components, including virtualization, server, and network technologies.  These VSPEX configurations enable customers to leverage the power of EMC with Cisco’s UCS servers and industry leading networking to radically simplify private cloud deployments. Cisco UCS combines high-performance computing, networking, virtualization, and storage-access resources into a single unified system. This solution helps organizations quickly move toward a more cost-effective private cloud environment.

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Tags: cloud, Cloud Computing, data center, EMC, Microsoft, UCS, vspex

Maybe you’re like me, looking for any excuse to hop on a plane to Boston!  In this case, I happen to have a good one, Red Hat Summit, which kicks off on June 11th.

Cisco is proud to be a Platinum Sponsor for the event and we’re showing up in full force with a larger booth, more demos, a Cisco keynote, breakout, and a number of new solution areas that we plan to showcase.  We’ll have a number of product and solution experts available to share our view on how Cisco Solutions, hosted on UCS infrastructure, are building a better data center.

One presentation you should be sure not to miss is the Cisco Keynote on Wednesday, June 12th at 9:30 AM with Ram Appalaraju, Vice President of Technology, Products and Solutions Engineering at Cisco.  It’s safe to say, Ram has an important role at Cisco.  He is essentially responsible for delivering Cisco’s Unified Data Center strategy in the form of products and solutions.  This will certainly prove to be a presentation not to be missed!

In addition, Han Yang, Product Manager for Cisco Nexus 1000V, will discuss the Nexus 1000V on KVM with OpenStack Integration.  Since Han was one of the original Engineers developing the Nexus 1000V, this makes him uniquely qualified to present this breakout.  This session will be held in room 312 on Thursday, June 13th at 1:20 pm.

Please see below for the four key solutions that Cisco is showcasing at the Partner Pavillion:

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Tags: Big Data, Blade Servers, Cisco UCS, Cloud Computing, data center, Nexus 1000v, OpenStack, rack server, Red Hat Summit, unified computing, unified computing system

I always find it funny when there is a commercial for a product that is intended to help you but the commercial ends with a low talking voice that casually itemizes the potential side effects. And I usually laugh because I am reminded of the one time popular fat substitute that had a less than pleasant side effect.

However there are sometimes good side effects, the UCS PowerTool PowerShell toolkit has two very powerful cmdlets, one of which has a side effect or should I say “side benefit” that is useful to everyone that downloads software from the Cisco website

Get-UcsCcoImage – Download a software image from the Cisco website.

Get-UcsCcoImageList – Get a list of images that can be downloaded from the Cisco website.

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Guest blog by Calvin Nieh, Microsoft Solutions Marketing Manager at NetApp.

This week, at Microsoft TechEd 2013 in New Orleans, NetApp and Cisco’s FlexPod with Microsoft Private Cloud was named a Finalist in the Best of TechEd 2013 awards program by Windows IT Pro®.

The Best of TechEd 2013 awards recognize companies that offer innovative products to the industry. The judging panel reviewed more than 300 products and services and chose 33 finalists to be interviewed at Microsoft TechEd North America 2013 in New Orleans. Winners will be determined at the show by judges and an attendee choice competition (attendees can vote online here) and then announced on the show floor on June 5th, 2013. Winners will also be published online at http://www.windowsitpro.com and http://northamerica.msteched.com.

Teams from both companies are honored and excited by this recognition, the result of years of technology investment and collaboration between the two companies.  Cisco’s Nexus 1000v was also named a Finalist in the virtualization category of the Best of TechEd 2013 award program.  In addition to these distinctions at TechEd, NetApp was recently recognized as Microsoft’s Server Platform Partner of the Year for 2013, an awesome follow-up to winning Microsoft’s Private Cloud Partner of the Year award in 2012.

NetApp’s collaboration and partnership with Cisco on FlexPod represents a combination of industry leaders in their respective fields.  FlexPod® with Microsoft® Private Cloud is a converged infrastructure platform featuring deeply integrated compute, networking, and storage as well as industry leading integration with Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1.

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Tags: data center, FlexPod, Microsoft, netapp, private cloud