This month we’re marking a special milestone… there are now 10,000 UCS customers worldwide. The natural question becomes: what’s driving this phenomenal growth? How could this possibly have been predicted?
The best explanation of snowballing UCS adoption is found in customer results. Lest we forget, adopting a new platform in the data center is not a decision undertaken lightly in IT, but word has spread in the industry about the real world benefits UCS is delivering. More and more customers are taking a look and liking what they find. It’s an admittedly bold statement to say UCS has changed the economics of the datacenter, but I’m here to tell you that it’s not marketing hype. We’re hearing from customers who are reporting all-in savings in the range of 40% on the cost of computing. Travelport, for example, conducted a deep dive TCO analysis of their pre/post UCS world and here is how they are seeing their data center economics change over the next 5 years:
| Cost Category | Cisco Environment | Prior Environment | Dollar Savings | Percentage Savings |
| Hardware Capital | $7,406,982 | $9,747,500 | $2,340,518 | 24% |
| Power and Cooling | $915,468 | $2,947,273 | $2,031,805 | 69% |
| Server Administration | $162,255 | $1,151,945 | $989,690 | 86% |
| Hardware Maintenance | $301,194 | $585,749 | $284,555 | 49% |
| TOTAL | $8,785,899 | $14,432,467 | $5,646,568 | 39% |
The savings stem from a variety of sources: lower capex as the platform efficiently scales, dramatically reduced administrator time, density/ power savings and reduced SW licensing costs as more workload lands on fewer servers. It’s cumulative and powerful. If you want a firsthand look at the TCO/ROI impact UCS can make in your data center, check out our calculator; with 5 minutes you can get a ballpark estimate.
Economics aside, UCS just seems to make people happy. I had a customer declare that his infrastructure was now “CTO proof.” He went on to explain that this meant the boss could deploy a server by himself without breaking anything. The infrastructure team let their CTO take a B-series blade straight out of the box, insert it into a chassis slot, and as the system identified and integrated the new resource into the available pool, they congratulated him on his first server deployment.
Beyond economic impact and increasing happiness in the data center, it doesn’t hurt that you can drop the clutch and put serious power to the ground in application performance. In December Cisco posted TPC benchmark results that surpassed existing records by as much as 32% in raw performance and 26% in price performance. This brings the total number of UCS world record results to 54 since introduction in 2009.
10,000 customers and growing, and it’s no wonder why.
Tags: blades, data center, Servers, UCS, unified computing, Unified Data Center
