What do these three things have in common? For Lone Star College System (LSCS), the fastest growing community college in the U.S., these items helped build a whole new technology foundation.

While at a higher-education conference, CIO of LSCS, Link Alander, and former VP of data center virtualization at Presidio, Steve Kaplan, began hashing out what it would take to deliver the best computing experience—on a napkin. They jotted down all the ways technology could deliver a customizable, optimal, and educational platform to students and faculty.

The vision was a toolbox, not just any one tool: an entire resource pool for professors to contribute to -- and students to pull from -- anytime, on any device, from anywhere.

Click here to read full story.

Tags: any device, cloud, data security, desktop virutualization, higher education, mobility, network, UCS, unified computing, unified computing system, Unleashing IT, virtualization

Every Friday, we’ll highlight the most important Cisco partner news and stories of the week, as well as point you to important Cisco-related content you may have missed along the way. Let’s have it.

Off The Top

If you’re at all involved or interested in Cisco’s partner marketing efforts, this was your week. Cisco’s seventh Marketing Velocity conference kicked off in Cannes, France, and built momentum over three exciting days of main stage presentations, breakout sessions and networking, as well as a great party or two.

Among the highlights, we’ve recapped the winners of our inaugural Cisco Best Integrated Marketing Campaign Awards, and talked with Cisco Senior Vice President Karen Walker about the shift going on from lead and demand generation to true revenue marketing.

What did partners think of the event? We’ll have lots of wrap-up content to come in the next week, but for now make sure you check out partner perspectives from the first two days of the show below. As a reminder, you can see all of the day-to-day action via our @partnervelocity Twitter handle, too.

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Tags: Cisco, data center, Marketing Velocity, Microsoft, UCS, Weekly Rewind

How time flies: Cisco and Intel are celebrating their one-year partnership anniversary of Unleashing IT with the launch of the all new, Spring 2013 edition. Available online and in print, this latest installment is once again packed with thought-leadership content and company profiles.

Over the past year, Unleashing IT has uncovered and shared many IT best practices. The industries represented through the company profiles featured are extremely diverse, as are their solutions and deployment strategies.

But there is a common thread -- they are all are leveraging data center technology to advance, accelerate and streamline their business, enter new markets, all while achieving substantial cost savings. From education to healthcare to utility companies, innovation in the data center is driving their success -- and allowing them to keep up with demands of the business.

Perhaps you will find inspiration from these profiles, sparking new ideas -- and allowing you unleash the full potential of IT for your business.

To get full access to Unleashing IT, subscribe or log in here.

Tags: Cloud Computing, cost control, customers, data center, Data Center infrastructure efficiency, desktop virtualization infrastructure, references, success stories, thought leadership, UCS, virtualization

Cisco Unified Computing Systems (UCS) server platform continues to make significant strides in becoming a major player in the mission-critical application space, in this case SAP. UCS just claimed a fantastic benchmark using the UCS B200 on SAP Sybase ASE.

Cisco has also been running a comprehensive set of world-wide SAP HANA Roadshows. They have consisted of 11 road shows in the US, 6 road shows in EMEAR, 3 road shows in Canada, and 1 in APJC. As a result, the demand for SAP HANA on the Cisco UCS Server Platform has dramatically increased.

Cisco now has over 50 customers running SAP HANA on Cisco UCS Servers. Some of these customers vary from very large service provider companies, medical device firms, large international food companies, and world wide travel companies. The size of the server used for these customers vary from small rack mount servers (Cisco UCS C260), to medium configurations (Cisco C460) to larger installs that take advantage of the Cisco Blade Server Technology (Cisco B440). All of these servers are certified for SAP HANA and are currently available on the SAP Product Availability Matrix (PAM).

You can see this investment in the Cisco booth #1412 at SAP Sapphire from May 14-16 in Orlando, Florida. Look forward to seeing you there

For more information on the Cisco SAP partnership , visit also our website .

Tags: Cisco, cloud, HANA, SAP, SAP PAM, SAP SD Benchmark, TUI, UCS

We’re at the final day of Microsoft’s Management Summit 2013 (MMS 2013) here in Las Vegas. We’ve handed out ~1,500 t-shirts; performed hundreds of demos on our technologies Nexus 1000V, UCS Manager, VM-FEX, and Cisco PowerTool; evangelized our Microsoft Cloud OS solutions FlexPod and VSPEX; and generally interacted with most of the 5,000+ attendees here.

Show attendees now have a better understanding of our technologies but also and perhaps more importantly, have a better and growing understanding of the true value we bring to their Microsoft oriented data centers.

Figure 1.

 As Figure 1 shows, organizations are challenged in many ways – staff inefficiency, unscheduled downtime, OpEx and CapEx pressures, etc. We feel our Cisco Unified Data Center is a viable solution to these challenges. It delivers operational simplicity and business agility -- essential for cloud computing. The Microsoft and Cisco alliance extends the value of the Cisco Unified Data Center by integrating Windows Server, Hyper-V, Microsoft workloads such as SQL and Exchange, and finally System Center and UCS Manager management stacks into manageable and scalable solutions. As a highly secure, scalable environment for your organization the Cisco Unified Data Center automates and simplifies deployment, orchestration, and management across server, network, and cloud.

The value derived from a Cisco Unified Data Center we is that we can now help your data center scale to meet your business dynamics; simplify your I.T. management processes; lower your operating costs while delivering world class performance. In the world of Microsoft oriented data centers, we deliver this value to your organization through:

• Cisco Validated Designs for Microsoft Private Cloud Solutions

Move to the cloud quickly and easily with the help of Cisco Validated Designs. Part of the Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track program, these preconfigured solutions consist of industry-leading technologies from Cisco, EMC (VSPEX) and NetApp (FlexPod). Reduce your risk and enjoy end-to-end architectural and deployment guidance with pretested design guides

• Cisco Validated Designs for Microsoft Workloads

To ensure Cisco customers running Microsoft software get the most from their data centers, Cisco designs, pretests, validates, and provides support for a growing list of Microsoft solutions such as Microsoft Exchange Server, SQL Server, and SharePoint Server.

• Ability to Consolidate and Virtualize Microsoft Applications

Microsoft applications such as SQL Server, SharePoint Server, and Exchange Server are often prime candidates for consolidation and virtualization. Administrators can expedite and simplify virtualization deployment, management, and operations by using Cisco’s high-bandwidth, low-latency, virtualization-aware unified network fabric, Cisco UCS and Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V.

As you can see from the various customer quotes – Xerox, Cassidy Turley, and ING Direct -- true value in terms of economies of scale, improved performance, and efficiencies are seen. To learn more about our Cisco Unified Data Center and its transformational power, please feel free to download our new brochure Microsoft on UCS: Simplify Your IT and Transform Your Business

To learn more about Cisco’s Microsoft data center capabilities, please visit www.cisco.com/go/microsoft

Tags: Cisco, FlexPod, Hyper-V, Microsoft, Nexus 1000v, System Center, UCS, UCS Manager, vspex