“Great teamwork is the only way we create the breakthroughs that define our careers.” -- Pat Riley (championship coach)
Sometimes change is difficult because of actual uncertainty, and sometimes change is difficult because of perceived uncertainty. The former is usually measured through probability and addressed via risk mitigation techniques. That latter is overcome through education and little bit of “prove it to me”.
But sometimes it’s about more than technology and vision. Sometimes it’s about people, and concerns about uncertainty. What happens when previously isolated technologies begin to converge?
This is one of the areas that we will be highlighting at EMC World 2011 this week, in speaking sessions, booth demonstrations and theater presentations. Our goal is to not only highlight best-in-class convergence technologies, but educate network and storage professionals about the realities of creating Data Center Fabric networks with Cisco.
Question: Maybe you’re asking yourself, “Who owns the platforms and network when they converge into a Data Center Fabric?”
The answer: You do. The Storage Teams. The Network Teams. You own the distribution of responsibilities, and the underlying infrastructure allows you to either isolate operations or begin to integrate them. At your pace. According to your business needs. Read More »
More good news on the momentum of our Cisco UCS server platform came our way today as we were notified that our B250-M2 blade server series is a Finalist for Best of Show at Microsoft Tech Ed 2011 in the Hardware category.
Annually, the Best of Tech Ed awards recognize companies who offer innovative products for the industry. This year the judges reviewed 334 products and services submitted for the award and chose 47 finalists to be interviewed at the Microsoft Tech Ed North America 2011 conference in Atlanta, Georgia on May 16, 2011. Winners will be announced at an invite only evening reception at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, May 18.
“We received a record number of nominations this year—more than 300—and determining an array of finalists from that large, diverse field was difficult,” said Jason Bovberg, Senior Editor at Windows IT Pro®. “The mix of products and services from year to year is ever-changing and exciting, and we feel that our 49 finalists represent highly distinguished products and services in their categories. We look forward to our show-floor interviews, which will lead to the determination of winners. For all categories, as always, our judging process involves three criteria: strategic importance to the market, competitive advantage, and value to customers. Our winners will be particularly strong in those areas.”
This is a great confirmation of our Cisco UCS server family and shows Cisco’s continued growth in support of the Microsoft ecosystem and the importance of Exchange, Hyper-V, SQL Server, SharePoint, System Center, and Windows Server 2008 R2 environments. We encourage Microsoft Tech Ed attendees to stop by our Cisco booth #1614 at the show and see the B250 in action!
With an ever growing mobile and distributed workforce, application developers are being tasked to develop applications that can also be remotely accessed by this global workforce. Application developers, with a very basic understanding of networking, assume the network has no boundaries and applications perform optimally regardless of the mode of access. At the same time, cloud computing is enabling applications to be consolidated into centralized and virtualized data centers, further increasing the distance from where the applications are being accessed. Network architects are also being challenged with current network designs for this application deployment and delivery model. The available bandwidth is being taxed as the ever growing applications portfolio competes for network resources to provide a satisfying user experience across the network without boundaries. This application delivery model also demands capabilities for better visibility and control, WAN optimization, and agility of the network to rapidly deploy and manage enterprise applications.
The Cisco Application Velocity solution addresses all the challenges associated with the delivery and consumption of enterprise applications over the network without boundaries. It is one of the five services in Cisco’s Borderless Network Architecture and is composed of innovative Cisco technologies that help IT professionals meet or exceed business SLAs, maximize user experience, optimize resource utilization, and increase reliability and user expectations.
The Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) server platform was introduced 2 years ago. The first SAP installation on this platform happened shortly after that. Yet when CIO’s and Application Architects are asked if they plan on running their SAP instances on UCS, many times their initial response is, “huh”.
Companies who run their business on SAP, can take no chances. If their application shuts down, so does their business, costing them, depending upon the size of the business, millions of dollars a day and in some cases millions of dollars an hour. So why should they take a chance on running their application on a two year old Cisco server platform?
Cisco is already a SAP hardware partner selected and certified for HANA
Cisco is a SAP hardware partner selected and certified for Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA)
The Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) Server Platform was designed from the ground up, for virtualization
The unique design of the UCS motherboard allows for up to four times the memory slots per blade chassis; no expansion chassis required. You can either increase the memory on your blade using 16GB DIMMS to satisfy software requirements or use more of the smaller 8GB DIMMS, utilizing the additional memory slots, satisfying your memory requirements and spending less.
UCS blades are stateless and use software-based Service Profiles to manage the server. This means that you set up a profile once and are able to attach or reassign that profile to any blade added or already in use. In some cases this saves 2 to 3 days of configuration time and allows the blade to become active in as little as 30 minutes.
Virtual Interface Cards are used in the Unified Computing System. You can assign 128 VM’s to a VIC. 2 cards are allocated per server. Instead of having 256 cables behind your server you now have 2.
Server cabinets typically get no respect when folks try to improve the energy efficiency of their Data Centers. Why would they? Cabinets don’t consume power. They don’t even have moving parts. They’re the second-string of Data Center physical infrastructure, used only so hardware, power strips and patch fields don’t have to sit in a heap on the hosting area floor.
If you’re treating the cabinets in your Data Center like nothing more than shelving units, though, you’re overlooking a useful tool. Choosing the right server cabinet and being strategic about how components are installed within them can optimize airflow, reduce hot spots and even reduce power consumption as the Data Center’s cooling system doesn’t have to work as hard.
Consider their role in dissipating heat produced by high-performance hardware.
