Once again this year Cisco will be a Platinum sponsor at Microsoft’s Management Summit 2013 (MMS 2013) in Las Vegas, April 8 – 12. At the event we will showcase new Cisco solutions and technologies applicable to the world of Windows Server, System Center, and Hyper-V.
We’re participating in a small way via sponsorship with Microsoft in their Cloud OS Trivia Challenge. Join your peers in the Microsoft Cloud OS Trivia Challenge; test your knowledge with trivia for a chance to win some excellent prizes-including a trip to MMS 2013. You also have a chance to win a Microsoft Surface, Windows 8, Windows Server, or a Linksys Router. Play Now!
Are you in the market for a new car in this year? Automotive retailers compete for your business in one of the most competitive industries, so reducing infrastructure and operating costs is key to selling you a car at the price you want.
Hendrick Automotive Group is the second largest privately held automotive retailer in the US, with 7,000 employees and 80 dealerships. Watch the 3:39 minute video for more information on how Hendrick is running every mission critical application on UCS, saving more than $100,000 annually, and helping the IT department become a profit center while offering superior service to both their employees and customers.
What’s been your experience with consolidation and virtualization in your data center? Are planning to use UCS in your data center? Join the conversation.
>> Interested in reading UCS customer success stories in your region? Read more at Data Center Case Studies
As we got past the Mayan Apocalyse day and as 2012 comes to an end, a question to reflect upon is if this has been the year of the Converged Infrastructure Solutions. Incidentally, use of these solutions by data centers was a topic of discussion on a panel moderated by Jim McHugh last month.
Just so we are on the same page, Converged Infrastructure Solutions are those which have integrated servers (CPU & Memory), server virtualization (hypervisor) and storage with the necessary network access into a single entity or logical unit. Examples are the VCE Vblock, NetApp FlexPod, Hitachi Data Systems UCP, IBM PureFlex System and HP CloudSystem (all names are trademarks of the respective companies). Even Dell has started marketing converged systems. The term pre-integrated has to be dissected carefully. In some cases the precise choices on server, storage array and the hypervisor have already been made by the vendor. In others, there is a choice on these infrastructure components and the solution is a reference design with tested scenarios. For instance, the Vblock is a fully integrated and tested solution with Cisco UCS for servers and network access, Cisco MDS 9148 storage switches, EMC VNX series storage and VMware virtualization. The misunderstanding on converged solutions is deep enough that an IBM PureFlex video goes on to compare the UCS Manager (manages only the UCS components) to the PureFlex management software, when in reality it should be compared with the Vblock management software. Read More »
This week , I met Johnny Tung, Systems Marketing Manager for Data Center Solutions, to talk about a very interesting announcement : The Virtualized Multiservice Data Center
” Johnny , can you tell us what Happened to Cisco’s Unified Data Center on Dec 3th?
Well…it just got more interesting! You may have heard of Virtualized Multiservice Data Center. Let me remind you. It is Cisco’s reference architecture for the Unified Data Center. The big news here is that we have just released the 3.0 design. We are introducing Cisco FabricPath into the Unified Data Center network in order to simplify and scale Cloud Ready Infrastructure designs for Private and Virtual Private Cloud deployments.
FabricPath simplifies and expands existing data center network design by removing the complexities of Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), and thus enabling more extensive, flexible, and scalable Layer 2 designs. This release marks the introduction of FabricPath-based designs into VMDC; further FabricPath-related VMDC releases will follow as Cisco develops and evolves its FabricPath offerings.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I was in London last week at a conference. I picked up the badge shown in the photo below, and it made me laugh, and I thought it would be a good image to pass on. VCE’s Vblock was the only example of converged infrastructure on show there.
Once again this year Cisco will be a Platinum sponsor at Microsoft’s Management Summit 2013 (MMS 2013) in Las Vegas, April 8 – 12. At the event we will showcase new Cisco solutions and technologies applicable to the world of Windows Server, System Center, and Hyper-V.
