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Cisco Validated Designs (CVD) for the Data Center – Your Feedback?

This past week, Thomas Scheibe (Director, Data Center Architecture) had the opportunity to co-present with VMware and NetApp at TechFieldDay on a broad range of Data Center topics.

Thomas is one of the leaders in our Solutions and Strategy Unit (SASU) that is responsible for creating Cisco Validated Designs (CVD).  One of the topics discussed was the recent CVD on Enhanced Secure Multi-Tenancy and Thomas asked, “How many of you are familiar with the depth of technical content in a CVD?

I’m somewhat disappointed to say that the show of hands was less than unanimous. Now this shouldn’t have come as a complete surprise to us, because in the past CVDs were primarily targeted at Network Administrators and the TechFieldDay audience is traditionally more focused on Servers, Storage and Applications. But considering that many of our Data Center solutions are no longer just focused on networking elements, we look at this as an opportunity to create awareness for the Architect and Administrator communities. We also look at it as an opportunity to solicit your input and feedback on how we can better deliver content that will help you design and deploy Data Center solutions that are becoming more complicated as convergence, virtualization, and automation blur the lines between IT organizations. Read More »

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Unified Computing – The Evolution of Computing as a Platform

[Part II of our blog series on Cisco Data Center Business Advantage. Part I, III, IV, V, VI]

One of the great things about being a market disruptor is that you don’t need to carry along all of the baggage that slow down other companies as technology or market transitions occur. Of course, one of the frequent challenges to being a disruptor is that you often have to ask customers to adopt an entirely new technology standard in order to realize the benefits of your product.

With the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), we actually deliver the best of both worlds. Read More »

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Open Ecosystem – Open to Excellence and Better with Cisco

[Part VI of our blog series on Cisco Data Center Business Advantage. Part I, II, III, IV, V]

When some of the largest companies in the world get together and demand choice, it means that any vendor interested in delivering solutions had better be creating architectural flexibility. And not just architectural flexibility, but also creating and enabling an open ecosystem with market leaders across a broad range of capabilities.

At a time when some vendors are moving towards vertically integrated solutions, limiting customer choice, Cisco continues to be committed to open standards and open architectures within the Data Center. This model has enabled tremendous growth in the Internet, and with more systems being interconnected (Internet, Public/Private Cloud, Mobile) the need for interoperability has never been greater. Read More »

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A Trillion Dollar Stimulus Plan for the U.S.

October 20, 2010 at 2:45 pm PST

Today, in the Wall Street Journal, Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers and Oracle President Safra Catz wrote an op-ed on the topic of repatriation of foreign earnings. Entitled, “The Overseas Profits Elephant in the Room: There’s a trillion dollars waiting to be repatriated if tax policy is right,” (subscription required) Chambers and Catz state:

“One trillion dollars is roughly the amount of earnings that American companies have in their foreign operations—and that they could repatriate to the United States. That money, in turn, could be invested in U.S. jobs, capital assets, research and development, and more.

But for U.S companies such repatriation of earnings carries a significant penalty: a federal tax of up to 35%. This means that U.S. companies can, without significant consequence, use their foreign earnings to invest in any country in the world—except here.”

There is quite a discussion on this topic on the Wall Street Journal’s website currently and, of course, we’d love to hear your opinion here as well.

By the way, Chambers and Catz also offer an idea for hiring an additional 2 million new workers as a result of allowing these foreign earnings to be repatriated.

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Oracle on Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS): A Real Evaluation

September 23, 2010 at 12:00 pm PST


This year Cisco has a growing presence at Oracle Open World with a booth in the exhibition area  comparable in size to the booths of the major server vendors.
Don’t make any mistake . In case you still don’t know, Cisco is in the server market, and has big plans with the unified computing systems (UCS)   and the Cisco Data center Business Advantage architectural framework

As a vendor of servers we talked a lot about performances and benchmarks --  And why not ? After all thanks to  the UCS we have been breaking one after one all the major benchmark records, proving many times, that  our vision and design of server  is the right one.

But I am more interested in what the customers who discovered the unified computing system have to say – So I invited yesterday Brady Reiter, NaviSite General Manager, Enterprise Architecture and Application  for a little and casual conversation in front of the  camera with Alex Krasne one of our blogger.

The NaviSite team is deploying a cloud based platform , that they use to deliver Oracle Application Management – So we asked Brady  what was the business context and  the evaluation process (Cisco vs HP, IBM, Sun) , and what are the results he got so far   -- Here is what Brady  has to say 

I met also Doug Beasley, one of our consulting engineer, who shared with me  some of the amazing capabilities that the Unified Computing System offers to the IT organizations in the context of Oracle applications deployment and management 

Read More »

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