Sure, there are many events and conferences going on this week, but stick a reminder on your calendar to watch this week’s episode of Engineers Unplugged. Ed Saipetch (@edsai) of Speaking in Tech and other fames and Andre Leibovici (@andreleibovici) of VMware talk about the evolution of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), VDI, EUC, and the changes brought about by new devices.
Bringing the 1970s office to you, unicorn style.
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)
Submit ideas for episodes or volunteer to appear by Tweeting to @CommsNinja
Practice drawing unicorns
What have been your challenges (IT or client side) as we move into the world of mobile employment and endlessly proliferating devices and apps? Post a comment here, or join the discussion on Twitter, #EngineersUnplugged.
3 years ago Cisco entered the server platform market with the Unified
Computing System (UCS). This server platform was built from the ground up
for virtualization and immediately started making an impact and gaining
market share. Today it holds the number 2 position worldwide for blades.
At this same time Cisco began to deepen its partnership with SAP. SAP
customers who had relied on Cisco for their networking gear looked to
expand the Cisco relationship by moving their SAP instances to UCS. SAP
HANA accelerated many of these customers move to UCS. Because SAP HANA
operated outside the bounds of the Data Center, it has allowed the
companies to look at UCS without affecting their current SAP instance
while proving UCS as a fast, reliable, scalable, cost reducing platform,
giving the customers confidence that Cisco UCS can more than handle the
mission-critical application workload
But that was just the beginning of the relationship between these two
giants. The diversity of both Cisco and SAP has allowed for a much more
strategic and far reaching relationship allowing each of us to expand our
business together.
SAP Afaria and Precision Retail in SAP’s mobility area combined with the
Cisco mobility and Cisco UCS platform business is bringing mobility to
the masses in a cost efficient way. In addition SAP has begun
collaboration with Cisco’s Jabber collaboration product again using UCS
as the basis platform for these products. Teamed together, Cisco’s and
SAP’s Cloud business has also made a big impact in the form of Vblock and
Flexpod.
Last but not least, Cisco, unlike its platform competitors, partners with
EMC and NetApp for the storage and SANS product in order to complete all
solutions with SAP. Customers enjoy the flexibility of these solutions
allowing them to keep the vendors they have already standardized on. An
added bonus to these customers is that it allows them to also maintain
their reseller relationships using the massive channel capabilities of
Cisco, where over 95 per cent of Cisco products are sold
Cisco and SAP recently completed a 20 city world wide SAP HANA and Cloud
road show generating millions of dollars of new revenue for both
companies. Cisco and SAP are the world leaders in their respective
areas, reinforcing their position in the market connecting the world in
the Internet of Things.
By: VCE CTO Trey Layton at EMC World 2013 (@treylayton)
Greek philosopher, Heraclitus said “change is the only constant in life.” And without question, change is the lifeblood to our industry and like any transition, albeit from VHS to digital, from board games to mobile apps, or even dare I say it, Tom and Jerry to Jerry Springer, the “customer” conversation takes on a new shape, with new questions and a fresh dialogue.
Today, we’re seeing something very similar with a natural transition towards convergence in the data center market. No longer is the conversation about the impact on IT departments, but about how to influence change to meet the business needs of the company. Refocusing an entire business around a common goal is no easy feat, especially within those longer standing companies with more traditional, more siloed approaches to their business – and as such skill sets are once again going to have to change or people will find their options becoming limited. Like the technology they’re going to have to adjust; it’s a natural transition for not only the IT department, but leaders across multiple faculties of the business.
Economic and competitive pressures are demanding we do more with fewer resources. Take Columbia Sportswear who deployed Vblock systems in order to transform IT to be much more service orientated in order to fulfill business requests that much faster. Rapid deployment and ease of use also enabled Columbia to redirect IT staff to find new ways to solve business problems, rather than focused on the IT “plumbing”. Above all, the need for flexibility is commonplace in today’s business environment and hence require their IT to “never say no” regardless of the project that comes through the door.
VCE is leading the charge into the next generation data center, simplifying and accelerating data center modernization efforts for our customers. Simply put, VCE represents the next evolution of IT, one focused on the next generation data center and the future of cloud computing.
So where do we go from here?
As the IT industry and the needs of the customer continue to evolve, so will VCE and the Vblock systems. Already we’ve taken our Vblock family to the next level by enhancing the existing 300 and 700 systems and expanded our portfolio by adding the 100 and 200 systems. We also developed Vblock Specialized Systems that are optimized for SAP HANA software and added our own layer of intelligence to existing management toolsets by creating VCE Vision Intelligent Operations to enable and simplify converged operations.
As we look to the future we will continue to innovate on top of the success we’ve already seen to ensure converged infrastructure retains its position as the foundation for next generation data centers. And trust me, there’s a lot more coming to you this year, including the notion of “hyper-convergence” – something you’ll hear a lot more from me on in the coming months.
Join us at this year’s EMC World in Las Vegas to experience for yourself the simplicity behind the Vblock converged systems and see what the future holds for the next generation data center.
The Transaction Processing Performance Council today announced its fifth international Conference on Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking (TPCTC 2013). I’ve the great privilege of chairing TPCTC series since 2009. This year’s conference will be collocated with the 39th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2013) on August 26, 2013 in Riva del Garda, Italy. With this conference we are encouraging researchers and industry experts to submit ideas and methodologies in performance evaluation, measurement and characterization. Additional information on TPCTC 2013 is available online at http://www.tpc.org/tpctc/tpctc2013/.
A new white paper from IDC discusses how converged infrastructure solutions from Cisco and EMC, through VCE, can enable IT organizations to deploy a highly virtualized, highly efficient computing infrastructure. For those new to the converged systems topic, VCE was formed by Cisco and EMC to build converged infrastructure systems that dramatically reduce the complexity that would otherwise be required to bring together technology components.
IDC highlights that the data center is changing and IT companies are adopting standards in hardware and software that will allow the entire infrastructure to be operated and managed more easily. IDC states that if standardization, flexibility, and simplification are not already top priorities for an organization, then complexity and inefficiencies can emerge as chief drivers of operational costs. To prove this point, IDC conducted platform migration studies in 2010 and 2012 and found that more than 50% of all sites were actively working on platform migration and that each migration targeted 40% or more of legacy systems (i.e. RISC/UNIX). The drive to consolidate workloads and to reduce costs continues to accelerate.
The white paper includes profiles from companies that have recently migrated from legacy RISC/UNIX platforms to VCE Vblock™ Systems and realized significant improvements in performance and reduction in server deployment times.
The paper conclusion summarizes that converged infrastructure solutions deployed as part of a data center transformation strategy can reduce IT staff costs, maintenance and management costs, and power/cooling costs.
