I am writing this from CA World 2013 in Las Vegas where the atmosphere is charged up. The theme for this conference is “Go Big. IT with Impact”. The idea is that IT departments have to think big to make material business impacts and succeed. At the end of the day IT needs to solve business problems. Companies need the right strategy and technology solutions to harness the Cloud, Internet of Everything, mobile and Big Data. In a “partner with impact” session exclusively for partners, David Bradley, SVP Channel Sales, CA Technologies featured Rick Snyder, VP Global Partner Organization, Cisco. The complete video is below
In this video, Rick mentions Cisco Validated designs (CVD), which are reference architectures, and blue prints for success. These designs incorporate a wide range of technologies and products into a portfolio of solutions developed to address the business needs of our customers. These CVDs document solutions that are tested to facilitate and improve customer deployments.
CA Technologies stressed the importance of the SaaS delivery model and the benefits of providing application services. CA also thinks that the opportunity for enterprise class application services offered as managed services will grow rapidly. Service providers should be beneficiaries of this shift. A common customer of Cisco and CA Technologies – Logicalis, won the partner impact award for their managed private cloud solution for a UK bank.
There were several interesting announcements in the past 24 hours. The following caught my attention.
CA in association with SAP will provide Mobile device Management solutions for enterprises. IT Management and Security are very high on the agenda for most enterprises. As more enterprise applications run on mobile devices securing and managing these devices becomes critical.
CA also announced devops automation capability with the Nolio products. With application aware system monitoring and management enterprises can expedite application development and reduce costs.
CA Technologies announced the acquisition of Layer 7 technologies, a leader in the API management space. APIs have become a necessity for application developers. REST-based APIs have allowed application developers to build rich web and mobile apps by providing the ability to integrate multiple services into individual application.
These approaches complement the way in which we help our own customers. The ISR-AXs are application aware and improve user experience at remote branch offices. The Cisco UCS has an API and facilitates infrastructure programmability. This enables integration, orchestration and execution of automated workflows. We will have two breakout sessions tomorrow at the conference:
TD055SN- Cisco UCS and CA: Operational efficiency with Converged Infrastructure (Speaker : Mark Balch, Director of Product Management, Data Center Business Unit)
TB056SN- Delivering Optimal Application Experience with Cisco ISR-AX (Speaker: Liad Ofek, Manager, Technical Marketing at the Service Routing Group)
I am eagerly looking forward to the keynote this evening by Richard Branson, Founder of Virgin Group.
I’m excited to mention that next week I’m hosting a webinar on BrightTalk, with my guest Ashok Rajagopalan, from Cisco’s UCS Product Management Team. You guessed it, we’ll be talking VDI, but more specifically, we’ll be exploring a new portfolio of architectures that are expanding the breadth of use cases and IT environments into which we can deliver cost-effective, easy-to-manage, high-performance virtualized desktops and apps.
I’ll be asking Ashok about some of the trends we’ve been seeing over the last year including the proliferation of flash memory based storage solutions and more importantly how Cisco is eliminating performance bottlenecks and delivering tier-0 (on-server) storage solutions for VDI, ideal for floating / stateless desktop environments.
Many customers we’ve met with are resonating with the ability to leverage server-installed storage footprint that offers expansive IOPS capacity, coupled with the simpler manageability through UCS Manager and Service Profile Templates.
Additionally we’ll discuss how Cisco is delivering a full spectrum or portfolio approach to offering reference architectures that map more closely to the specific VDI use cases. This expanded flexibility and choice is breaking down the CAPEX and operations hurdles many IT organizations face when implementing VDI. We’ll also discuss the best-of-breed technologies we’ve integrated from our solution ecosystem, and how you can take advantage of new reference architectures that help eliminate the guesswork from VDI.
Join us on Thursday April 25th, to learn more, and ask us your questions about how these new reference architectures and help you deliver desktop virtualization with reduced cost, increased flexibility and greater simplicity. Click here to register!
In Part 1 of this blog series, we looked at Gartner’s definition of Fabric based infrastructure (FBI). In part 2, we explored the benefits of service profiles and automation of server management. In this last installment, we will look into the benefits of fabric extension to virtual machines.
According to an IDC report (New Economic Model for the Data Center), the rate of growth of virtual machines is much higher than physical machines. The life cycle of virtual machines is more dynamic than physical servers. Virtual machines may need to be moved from one network to another for data access. Additionally, typical deployments of virtual machines have an extra layer of switching in the hypervisor. The software switches in the hypervisor emulate hardware at the expense of application performance. Cisco UCS solves these problems with the Cisco Virtual Interface cards (VICs) acting as adapter fabric extenders (fig 1) and bringing the network to virtual machines (VMs).
Another problem is that network administrators have no control on the soft switches in the hypervisor, which makes monitoring of network traffic to individual VMs very cumbersome. Cisco VICs use the VN-Tag standard in IEEE 802.1 BR standard to manage each link from the VM as if it were a Read More »
How time flies: Cisco and Intel are celebrating their one-year partnership anniversary of Unleashing IT with the launch of the all new, Spring 2013 edition. Available online and in print, this latest installment is once again packed with thought-leadership content and company profiles.
Over the past year, Unleashing IT has uncovered and shared many IT best practices. The industries represented through the company profiles featured are extremely diverse, as are their solutions and deployment strategies.
But there is a common thread -- they are all are leveraging data center technology to advance, accelerate and streamline their business, enter new markets, all while achieving substantial cost savings. From education to healthcare to utility companies, innovation in the data center is driving their success -- and allowing them to keep up with demands of the business.
Perhaps you will find inspiration from these profiles, sparking new ideas -- and allowing you unleash the full potential of IT for your business.
Cisco Unified Computing Systems (UCS) server platform continues to make significant strides in becoming a major player in the mission-critical application space, in this case SAP. UCS just claimed a fantastic benchmark using the UCS B200 on SAP Sybase ASE.
Since UCS was built from the ground up for virtualization, not only will its virtues lend itself to speed as evidenced by the SAP SD benchmark , UCS will also significantly lower operating costs in the process as evidenced by an external case study with TUI Travel or HotelsBeds out of Spain. Read and downlaod here the case study
Cisco has also been running a comprehensive set of world-wide SAP HANA Roadshows. They have consisted of 11 road shows in the US, 6 road shows in EMEAR, 3 road shows in Canada, and 1 in APJC. As a result, the demand for SAP HANA on the Cisco UCS Server Platform has dramatically increased.
Cisco now has over 50 customers running SAP HANA on Cisco UCS Servers. Some of these customers vary from very large service provider companies, medical device firms, large international food companies, and world wide travel companies. The size of the server used for these customers vary from small rack mount servers (Cisco UCS C260), to medium configurations (Cisco C460) to larger installs that take advantage of the Cisco Blade Server Technology (Cisco B440). All of these servers are certified for SAP HANA and are currently available on the SAP Product Availability Matrix (PAM).
You can see this investment in the Cisco booth #1412 at SAP Sapphirefrom May 14-16 in Orlando, Florida. Look forward to seeing you there
For more information on the Cisco SAP partnership , visit also our website .
I’m excited to mention that next week I’m hosting a 
Additionally we’ll discuss how Cisco is delivering a full spectrum or portfolio approach to offering reference architectures that map more closely to the specific VDI use cases. This expanded flexibility and choice is breaking down the CAPEX and operations hurdles many IT organizations face when implementing VDI. We’ll also discuss the best-of-breed technologies we’ve integrated from our solution ecosystem, and how you can take advantage of new reference architectures that help eliminate the guesswork from VDI.
