Cisco UCS has fantastic technology that technical decision makers are demanding. But what about business decision makers? It doesn’t matter how great the technology is, the question for BDMs is how will UCS save me money?
I set out to answer that question, connecting UCS technology innovations to TCO improvement, for the Unifying Your Data Center Roadshow (running through late June) and wanted to share the presentation with a larger audience so it has been posted to SlideShare.
The savings are grouped into two overall buckets: Unified Fabric (servers, networking, cabling, power & cooling) and Unified Management (provisioning, ongoing administration, and systems management software). Each sub-section discuss Cisco’s differentiation at a high level and shows how they impact the value of a UCS solution. The savings categories are validated by customer case studies, some of which you may remember from my first series of blog posts, Yes, Cisco Servers are that good. Lastly there are two real world TCO/ROI examples including Loughborough University who are cutting their costs ~50% over five years.
Would you like to learn more about how Cisco UCS can help you? There are more than 250 published datacenter case studies on Cisco.com. Additionally, there is a TCO/ROI tool that will allow you to compare your existing environment to a new UCS Solution. For a more in-depth TCO/ROI analysis, contact your Cisco partner
If sibling rivalry exists among Data Centers, our Richardson, Texas facility must be jealous. Unveiled in 2007 as Cisco’s next-generation Data Center and subsequently toured by thousands of visitors, the site hasn’t received much attention since its younger brother came online in 2011. Read More »
What’s the coolest technology you wish someone would invent for a Data Center?
As the more entrepreneurial among us are likely already aware, it’s National Inventors Month in the United States. In light of that – and the video below discussing how Data Centers themselves foster innovation – I thought it would be interesting to make a Data Center wish list. Just in case a fledgling Thomas Edison out there is looking for something to work on.
We had fun with last week’s post, I Saw What You Patched Last Summer, viewing the horrors that are the entries to Cisco’s recent Crazy Cabling Contest Fun because, as humorist Will Rogers famously noted, everything is funny as long as it is happening to someone else.
You obviously don’t want such cabling mayhem in your Data Center. Tangled cables greatly increase the risk of accidental downtime. They also inhibit airflow, forcing a Data Center’s cooling system to work harder to deliver chilled air to hardware and thereby increasing energy consumption and operational costs.
For those keeping score at home, here’s the winning submission as voted by visitors to Cisco’s Facebook page:
The top vote-getter from Cisco's Crazy Cabling Contest.
Messy cabling is also bad because it leads to more messy cabling. Have you ever walked into a Data Center with just one sloppy server cabinet? In my experience, server environments are either neat and tidy throughout or messy throughout.
So, what can be done to prevent tangled cabling in your Data Center?
Cisco recently hosted a Crazy Cabling Contest, inviting people to share photos of the most disorganized, rats-have-obviously-nested-here cabling within their server environments.
