data center

For everyone in the VMware Partner Community, next week marks the gathering of technologists to learn, train, and generally get together. Cisco has some great opportunities to do all of the above. The easiest way to stay up to date? Follow us @CiscoDC. If you’re not on Twitter, find me, give me 5 minutes, and […]

Cisco’s Unified Data Center strategy is rooted in the idea that customers shouldn’t be put in the position of DIY technology integration.  It’s just an unfair ask given everything that IT and LOB leaders contend with above and beyond the infrastructure.   As technology has evolved, the component parts of the data center are decreasingly the […]

We are back from the break with everyone’s favorite topic, simplicity in the data center. Specifically addressed in this episode, VCE’s Jeramiah Dooley (@jeramiah_clt) and Gartner’s Jeffrey Brooks (@JeffintheFM) take on converged management. Welcome to Engineers Unplugged, where technologists talk to each other the way they know best, with a whiteboard. The rules are simple: […]

Service Financial Management is the focus of Domain 6 in Cisco Services‘ DomainTenSM Model for Data Center and Cloud Transformation. Closely related to the User Portal (Domain 4) and Service Catalog and Management (Domain 5), service financial management is one of those organizationally challenging topics for the data center management team – although with the advent […]

Fabric-Based Infrastructure and Cisco UCS A good segue to Fabric-Based Infrastructure is Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Blade Servers (March 2012), by Andrew Butler and George Weiss.  To fully understand the tie in with Fabric-Based Infrastructure I suggest reading the section on Cisco UCS.  Their observations are important because they tie directly to the subject of […]

Updated 3/2/20313 Big Data is quickly becoming a critical priority for enterprises across all verticals.  Yet, there is currently a lack of any means of fair comparability of performance and price-performance of underlying platforms. The Big Data Benchmarking Community established last year to fill this void is announcing the efforts that have been undertaken thus far toward the […]

Cloud computing is part of the journey to deliver IT as a Service which enables IT to change from a cost center to a business strategic partner. Forrester Research recently published a report that concluded, “Cloud computing is ready for the enterprise… but many enterprises aren’t ready for the cloud.”1   Yet Cloud deployments are happening […]

Cisco Unified Computing System Service Profiles and Templates contain over 127 different server identification and configuration settings.  These identity settings are abstracted from the physical server and stored in the UCS Domain where they can be leveraged automating and speeding deployment while reducing errors. Today, this Cisco innovation is still unique in the industry. The […]

The evolution of the applications environment is creating new demands on IT and in the data center. Broad adoption of scale-out application architectures (i.e. big data), workload virtualization and cloud deployments are demanding greater scalability across the fabric. The increase in east/west (i.e. server-to-server) traffic along with the higher adoption of 10GbE in the server […]