by John Rollason, Senior Manager Product, Solutions & Alliances EMEA, NetApp
For many years the server market was dominated by the likes of IBM, HP/Compaq, Fujitsu, Dell, Sun and characterised by small market share shifts. True the market changed as rack and blade servers became popular, but most of the players recognized the shift and adapted. Then Server Virtualisation technologies changed the market and Cisco disrupted it completely with the launch of the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) in 2009. Today Cisco’s vision for server virtualization has been proven successful with more than 10,000 UCS customers and 54 UCS world record results. Customers obviously see the advantage!
Just over a year ago NetApp and Cisco introduced FlexPod, a pre-designed, pre-tested and validated Data Centre cloud solution built on modular and unified architecture composed of Cisco UCS servers, Cisco Nexus switches, and NetApp unified storage systems running Data ONTAP. FlexPod components are integrated and standardized to help you eliminate the guesswork and achieve timely, repeatable, consistent deployments. FlexPod has also been optimized with a variety of mixed application workloads and design configurations in various environments such as virtual desktop infrastructure and secure multi-tenancy environments.
Today more than 500 customers across 33 countries are seeing the benefits of Cisco UCS + NetApp. In fact, I”ve blogged about European FlexPod customers including Accenture, Börse Stuttgart, Computacenter, Terremark, Guiness Partnership, Loughborough University, and many more.
This week at Cisco Live London 2012 you’ll have the opportunity to hear directly from several organizations transforming their infrastructures and businesses on FlexPod and talk with variety of partners activity selling and developing solutions built on FlexPod. NetApp is a Platinum sponsor of Cisco Live and I’ll be at NetApp Stand P1 with the rest of the team for the 4th year. Highlights include:
Five fiscal years ago, only 3 individuals remained as months of interviews and screen tests concluded. None of us really knew what we were in for but it sounded interesting for sure. I had been in the sales field originally hired as an account manager, survived the job cuts of 2000 by re-casting myself as a security expert and became the first Security PSS of the South. I thought I was applying for a role in Cisco’s Speakers Bureau.
Felicia Ferrante
In August of 2006, Felicia Ferranti reached to introduce herself as the subject matter expert for our Unified Communications show. Felicia had been killing it as a sales rep in Los Angeles and she fit the profile for what TechWiseTV was chartered with: To scale the best messaging on the broadest reach platform.
Our trio was rounded out by a non-Cisco engineer we had not met right away. We were already hearing rumbling of his expertise as you could tell even in the final interview rounds if someone had already talked to him…the questions got a lot harder. We stole Jimmy Ray from HP where he was very well known as the engineer you wanted on your deals – did not matter what the tool or the technology was. He was (and is) the smartest, humblest, passionate SE you could find.
It was an incredibly confusing, tiring start to what is now, still tiring, but much more definable and certainly rewarding. Many people played a part in the early years and remain rooted as lynch pins in our history.
So VMworld Las Vegas is now in the rear-view mirror, and VMworld Copenhagen looms in the distance. Were you there? Did you get a chance to check out our VXI demo? If your calendar was packed, but missed the VXI breakout session on Monday, I’d encourage you to check out the online replay of #SPO3989 (Cisco VXI: Optimized Infrastructure for Scaling View Desktops) once it’s available. We also had some important announcements speaking to our joint innovation with VMware, captured here. Read More »
A few weeks ago, VMware announced a huge number of updates to their product portfolio, under the “Cloud Infrastructure Suite” umbrella. Without going into all the product/feature specifics, as plenty of blogs have already covered that, I wanted to highlight several areas where IT organizations will now have the opportunity to truly take advantage of joint integration and world-class technology from Cisco and VMware. I highlight these because many of them will be demo’d at the Cisco Booth (#700) at VMworld next week, as well as covered in white-boarding and Q&A sessions with our “Ask the Experts” panel each day.
So if you’re going out to VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas next week, I highly recommend you check out these technologies and opportunities to improve how IT is delivered to your business:
“Monster VMs” -- one of the key areas of vSphere 5 is enhanced capabilities to host large, Tier-1 application VMs. This is a huge advancement as IT organizations look to continue to drive greater utilization and efficiency in the data center, without sacrificing performance and availability. And there is no better x86 server platform to run those mission-critical applications on that Cisco UCS. Not only has the UCS plaform been independently proven to provide world-record performance for almost every application type, but more and more customers are voting with their wallets that UCS will be their next generation server platform (now up to 7400 customers as of August 2011). Read More »
by John Rollason, Senior Manager Product, Solutions & Alliances EMEA, NetApp
