It’s been another excellent quarter for UCS. At the end of Q2FY11, the annual revenue run rate for UCS increased to $650M, from approximately $500M at the end of Q1FY11. The momentum behind Cisco’s Data Center, Virtualization and Cloud strategies continues to advance, and Cisco expects that it will continue  making great progress on being the first architectural player in the Data Center in almost two decades.

The total number of unique UCS customers increased to approximately 4,000 at the end of Q2FY11, from 2,800 the prior quarter. Due to what Cisco believes is UCS’s compelling total cost of ownership advantage, Cisco has added net new UCS customers each quarter. This indicates increasing interest and a rapidly growing market opportunity for UCS. Furthermore, adoption was relatively balanced by customer segment and vertical. From a geographical perspective, UCS continues to be strong in the US/Canada theater with momentum building in Europe, APAC and Emerging Markets.

Q2FY11 Orders Customer Segment Mix for UCS:

• Commercial = 40%
• Enterprise = 28%
• Public Sector = 22%
• Service Provider = 10%

Q2FY11 Orders Theater Mix for UCS:

• US/Canada =  65%
• EMEA = 17%
• APAC and Emerging = 18

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Tags: data center, innovation, UCS

As part of some current SharePoint 2010 on FlexPod work, I have been setting up some VMware ESX servers to boot from SAN. After a few quick searchs I found a few very good posts online.

BootFromSAN101 with Cisco UCS
UCS Boot Whitepaper

I thought the BootFromSAN 101  post had a good outline. So I decided to take it a few steps futher and create a video on NetApp storage provisioning, Cisco Nexus 5000 zoning and Cisco UCS boot from SAN for VMware vSphere ESXi 4.1.

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Tags: CiscoUCS, netapp, nexus, SAN, System Manager, UCS

Are you going to HIMSS next week?  If so, I wanted to share the following with you.  Read More »

Tags: desktop virtualization, healthcare, himss, netapp, UCS, vdi, VMware, vxi

This is an exciting time—I am happy to announce Cisco’s participation in the Microsoft Fast Track 3.0 program for data warehousing. The Microsoft Fast Track program has been in existence for some time, but this is the first time Cisco has been invited to participate in this Microsoft program.

Fast Track 3.0 is the third generation of a marketing program designed to accelerate consideration and adoption of data warehouse solutions based on the latest version of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Release 2 software. Microsoft SQL Server is gaining importance as a critical tool for enterprises and midsize companies to gather business intelligence. The Cisco reference configurations for SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse for scale-up data warehousing will empower customers with choices only Cisco can offer. To provide more flexibility for our customers, Cisco will be releasing SQL Server data warehouse configurations with EMC storage and configurations with NetApp storage.

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Tags: Cisco, Data Warehousing, Exchange 2010, Fast Track 3.0, Microsoft, Microsoft SQL Server, partners, Sharepoint, UCS

So I go traveling for a few weeks and suddenly, it seems, everyone’s talking about moving “beyond silos”.  This is a subject near and dear to my heart, but I’m also a pragmatist. Many prescient sages have been warning for years of impending organizational shifts in IT—“Be prepared, or be doomed! Conquer your fear!” is the executive summary of many an article.  This is easier said than done, of course. What’s often left out is the “how” of leading an organization through such a transition, perhaps because until recently there were few case studies from which the prognosticators could glean best practices.

So here are a few considerations, and some examples of how to address them.

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Tags: Cisco, CITEIS, IT, silo busting, UCS, unified computing system, VMware