This guest blog post is brought to us from Microsoft author: David Hobbs-Mallyon, Senior Marketing Manager for Business Platform Solutions, Microsoft Corporation
Many IT Executives today are under increased pressure to deliver business results and provide competitive advantage to their organization by helping to drive innovation.
Tags: Cisco UCS, EMC, Fast Track 3.0, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SQL Server R2 Fast Track Data Warehouse 3.0, netapp, SQL Server 2008R2, UCS service profiles
Guest Post by Alex Jauch (Technical Architect, NetApp)
This week at Microsoft TechEd, NetApp and Cisco announced our joint Microsoft Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track submission. The submission was the result of a great working partnership between NetApp and Cisco. We’re very pleased with the solutions and technical expertise that the Cisco team brought to the project. Because of our strong partnership, Cisco and NetApp have been able to produce a great Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track solution.
Here’s an example, because both NetApp and Cisco have both been investing in our Microsoft management integration platforms and we have been able to integrate these features into our submission to Fast Track. Both Cisco and NetApp have been working closely with the Microsoft Opalis Integration Server team and we were able to combine our solutions into a single solution that enables rapid provisioning from a bare metal blade to a full running Windows Cluster and then VM provisioning against that cluster. You can see a demonstration of this solution here:
NetApp Hyper-V Cloud With Cisco Rapid Provisioning
Tags: Cisco, Cisco UCS, cloud, Hyper-V, Microsoft, MSTechEd, netapp, TechEd, UCS, virtualization
Sometimes Cisco creates some elaborate videos to convey ideas or concepts to the market or our customers. The production value is incredible and the imagery is often amazing.
Stop reading now if you’re looking for that here 
A good friend, the Data Center practice lead at a premier Cisco partner, asked me if we had any whiteboard videos that explained the value of Cisco UCS that he could use to help do on-going training with his sales team. They needed to be simple. He was already aware of the outstanding Cisco UCS Advantage video library, but he needed something up a few levels that was easy to remember. Read More »
Tags: automation, Cisco UCS, Consolidation, virtualization, x86 Compatible
This guest post is presented by Rex Backman, Global Marketing Manager for Microsoft Solutions, Cisco, rbackman@cisco.com
Cisco is very pleased to announce that Microsoft has invited us to be part of their Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track program. This is great news for our customers and partners as it will allow for Cisco UCS based server infrastructures for Windows Server 2008 R2 based private cloud deployments.
Tags: Cisco, Cisco UCS, cloud, Hyper-V, Microsoft, netapp, UCS, virtualization
I am happy to share that Cisco today announced the participation and availability of the SQL Server 2008 R2 Data Warehouse solutions as part of the Microsoft SQL Server Fast Track 3.0 program. This solution is designed to accelerate the consideration and adoption of data warehouse solutions based on Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2.
Solution Components
Over the last few months, we’ve worked very closely with Microsoft and our storage partners EMC and NetApp to develop the enabling reference architectures. These reference architectures will be published shorty, comprising of the fast growing Cisco UCS C-Series Servers, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, SQL Server 2008 R2, and choice of EMC VNX or NetApp FAS as the storage component of the solution.
Tags: Cisco, Cisco UCS, CiscoUCS, EMC, Microsoft, Microsoft SQL Server R2 Fast Track Data Warehouse 3.0, netapp, SQL Server 2008R2, TechEd 2011
