There has been huge customer and partner interest in FlexPod for VMware since its launch in November 2010. The key FlexPod values that are resonating well with the customers are:

• Flexible ITaaS platform built from simple, unified compute, fabric, and storage infrastructure
• Simplified purchase and flexible scale out model accelerates journey to private and hybrid cloud
• Cisco CVD based architectures and channel partner enabled deployment services for both the base FlexPod infrastructure and layered Tier-1 enterprise applications (Microsoft, SAP, VDI, etc.).
• Centralized management enabling streamlined operations
• Open management framework allowing simplified integration with 3^rd party orchestration tools
• Streamlined response to identify and quickly solve potential issues, enabled by cooperative 24/7 support model

I want to highlight that the CVD Program has been around for over a decade and has proved its worth time and again to help design and deploy next generation network architectures across the globe.

What do Channel Partners have to say about FlexPod for VMware?

Here is a short video by Paul Sorgiovanni, Data Management Practice Manager at Empired (one of the leading FlexPod global partner based in Australia). In this video, Paul explains how FlexPod for VMware has been extremely helpful in making their customers successful, and helped Empired evolve as a trusted advisor for their fast growing customer base.

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Tags: Cisco, Cisco CVD, CVD, Exchange 2010, FlexPod, netapp, Oracle, SAP, Sharepoint, SQL Server, vdi, virtualization, VMware

Virtualize Tier-1 Enterprise Applications on FlexPod for VMware

In today’s competitive environment, companies have to innovate rapidly to stay ahead of their competition, improve profitability, create new services and revenue streams, and reduce risks by adopting cost efficient business models.

The increased business pressure has a direct impact on the IT organization to innovate rapidly and efficiently meet the ever demanding business needs. At the same time, CIOs are struggling with the legacy, siloed, underutilized IT infrastructure and operational processes that were built based on the requirements of individual enterprise applications and processes. The end result is increased total cost of ownership and inability to help business be more agile, introduce new services, and achieve operational efficiency.

Why move enterprise applications to Virtual Infrastructure and Private Cloud?

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Tags: Cisco, cloud_computing, Exchange 2010, FlexPod, netapp, Sharepoint 2010, SQl Server 2008, VMware, vsphere

This is an exciting time—I am happy to announce Cisco’s participation in the Microsoft Fast Track 3.0 program for data warehousing. The Microsoft Fast Track program has been in existence for some time, but this is the first time Cisco has been invited to participate in this Microsoft program.

Fast Track 3.0 is the third generation of a marketing program designed to accelerate consideration and adoption of data warehouse solutions based on the latest version of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Release 2 software. Microsoft SQL Server is gaining importance as a critical tool for enterprises and midsize companies to gather business intelligence. The Cisco reference configurations for SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse for scale-up data warehousing will empower customers with choices only Cisco can offer. To provide more flexibility for our customers, Cisco will be releasing SQL Server data warehouse configurations with EMC storage and configurations with NetApp storage.

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Tags: Cisco, Data Warehousing, Exchange 2010, Fast Track 3.0, Microsoft, Microsoft SQL Server, partners, Sharepoint, UCS

As you plan to deploy mission critical business applications in cloud, the first thing that comes to mind is how can all the pieces of the puzzle (infrastructure, business apps, supporting tools etc.) be put together to get all the expected benefits and efficiencies, without introducing any negative tradeoffs. This requires that all the key differentiating technologies campaigned by the vendors to win your business should collectively work as a single solution, be scalable, easy to operate, and not introduce new complexities in your environment.

While individual technology focused documentation and scalability guidelines from vendors are great resource for getting in depth information about any particular technology, a lot of times they fall short of providing you the end to end solutions focused big picture. The most popular question I hear from customers is… “How would the Cisco Datacenter Business Advantage and our open ecosystem partner technologies work together as an end to end solution that provides value to more efficiently achieve the business objectives”? Few days back, I discussed the relevance of Cisco Datacenter Business Advantage technologies to your mission critical business applications.

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Tags: BMC, Cisco, CiscoUCS, citrix, EMC, ESMT, Exchange 2010, Hyper-V, netapp, Oracle, SAP, Sharepoint, SQL Server, VMDC, VMware, VMware View, vsphere, xendesktop