As many of you know, a big part of the UCS story revolves around the flexibility we’ve built into the UCS management model. While we hear great feedback from customers about the native UCS management GUI, we know that many of you have already invested lots of time in building automated solutions to repetitive IT tasks. To that end, we want to help you find ways to use the tools and processes that have already been built along side of UCS.
We know that many of our customers are already running Microsoft applications on top of UCS. For many of you, that means that you’re also likely automating repetitive tasks using Microsoft’s PowerShell scripting language. PowerShell is an immensely powerful tool in an IT admin’s bag of tricks. Introduced back in 2006, it has matured to become common across not only Microsoft’s business software, but also among their partner community -- including NetApp, Quest Software, and even VMWare.
Shortly after we brought UCS to market, we got a specific request from an early adopter to build out PowerShell support for UCS . Here on the team, nothing moves us faster than feedback directly from our customers, so it got the cogs turning and we’re happy to announce our first public release of the PowerShell Management Toolkit for UCSM. We decided to even take that a step farther -- besides providing PowerShell support, we’ve also made available .NET managed code that can be used to natively build UCS support into a .NET application. For the rest of the post, I’m going to spend some time talking about some of the nifty ways in which UCS PowerShell provider can be used. Fair warning here, folks -- we’re about to get technical
If what I saw at the Citrix Synergy conference in San Francisco this week is any indication of what will be coming soon, I’d better invest in a personal hairstylist.
With video becoming more and more prevalent on the network, whether it be mobile phones, Cisco Cius and other tablets, IP phones, or TelePresence – there isn’t a question of whether or not video is here to stay. But one question remains: Is your network ready? (And maybe one more question: how does my hair look?)
If your customers haven’t prepared their networks yet, here’s something that might give them the extra boost that they need: Cisco’s Visual Networking Index (VNI) Forecasted that videos will account for 90% of network traffic by 2013.
By selling Cisco Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI), you’ll help customers prepare for that change. We visited the Cisco booth at the conference and caught up with Cisco’s Operations Director Jeff Platon. He gave us a full tour of the end-to-end VXI system with products that utilize high-definition video.
Watch the full tour:
What else did we see at Citrix Synergy? Read More »
Great news on the Cisco UCS momentum as we continue to gain market share. The innovative Cisco UCS B250 M2 blade server today won the “Best of Show” award in the Hardware and Storage category at Microsoft TechEd 2011 in Atlanta. There were more than 300 submissions in various categories, out of which 47 made it to the finals. We blogged about this in detail earlier here.
Guest Post by Alex Jauch (Technical Architect, NetApp)
This week at Microsoft TechEd, NetApp and Cisco announced our joint Microsoft Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track submission. The submission was the result of a great working partnership between NetApp and Cisco. We’re very pleased with the solutions and technical expertise that the Cisco team brought to the project. Because of our strong partnership, Cisco and NetApp have been able to produce a great Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track solution.
Here’s an example, because both NetApp and Cisco have both been investing in our Microsoft management integration platforms and we have been able to integrate these features into our submission to Fast Track. Both Cisco and NetApp have been working closely with the Microsoft Opalis Integration Server team and we were able to combine our solutions into a single solution that enables rapid provisioning from a bare metal blade to a full running Windows Cluster and then VM provisioning against that cluster. You can see a demonstration of this solution here:
In a competitive market, differentiation makes all the difference. Whether you’re selling sneakers or servers, being able to offer the widest selection of products to meet a broad set of needs is critical in helping to drive growth and grow profits.
So today’s announcements of three new reference configurations focused on Microsoft applications and technologies will likely please you—now our partners will have even more opportunities to sell a broader set of solutions, giving customers more choice.
Today, along with our storage partners, Cisco is greatly expanding our channel partners’ ability to offer customers Microsoft-based private cloud, data warehouse, or OLTP configurations based on shipping Cisco UCS server and Nexus networking products. Three standalone, discrete reference architectures are now available: A Cisco-developed SQL Server 2008 R2 Data Warehouse solution; a Cisco-developed SQL Server 2008 R2 Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) offer; and Cisco as the server partner with NetApp as they bring to market their NetApp for Private Cloud offer as part of Microsoft’s Hyper-V Private Cloud program.
