We handed out a stack of these buttons for the Cisco booth staff to wear this year and that sums up my favorite part of EMC World:  it’s an infrastructure party.  This is a place where you’re going to talk with people at the heart of the data center and IT, and the conversations all start there.

Our alignment with EMC couldn’t be any clearer than what we had on display last week. VBlock continues to rock and roll and Trey Layton of VCE summed that up quite nicely here.   On the VSPEX front, Cisco recently released 7 new and updated integrated infrastructure designs that combine UCS, Nexus and VNX Storage.  Moreover, Cisco offers these as single-part-number SmartPlay Solution Pak bundles that make them even easier for our partners and customers to order.   Cisco’s VSPEX offerings span the gamut on choice of virtualization platform and application, paving that second of the three paths to cloud we talked about at EMCworld.

Cisco Virtualization Solution for EMC VSPEX with VMware vSphere 5.1 for 50 Virtual Machines

Cisco Virtualization Solution for EMC VSPEX VMware vSphere 5.1 for 100, 125, and 250 Virtual Machines

Cisco Virtualization Solution for EMC VSPEX with Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V for 50 Virtual Machines

Cisco Solution for EMC VSPEX: Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track 3.0 Enterprise Medium M250

Cisco Desktop Virtualization Solution for EMC VSPEX with VMware View 5.1.2 for 500 and 2000 Desktops

Cisco Desktop Virtualization Solution for EMC VSPEX with Citrix XenDesktop 5.6 for 500 Desktops

Cisco Solution for EMC VSPEX: Microsoft SharePoint 2010

On a product front the big news for Cisco was the new MDS 9710 and that brought a lot of visitors into the booth.  I was also really happy by the amount of people that came by to talk with us about UCS and the things we’re doing around data center automation.  Each year the conversation has changed and the evolution has been fun to experience:

2010

Customer: “What’s that funny looking switch there?”

Me: “That’s the Unified Computing System, are you familiar with Cisco’s new server platform?”

Customer:  “What? No, really, what’s that funny looking switch there??”

 2011/2012

Customer:  “Do you have any UCS on display here?  Our team in XYZ division just deployed it and I’d like to take a look”

Me: “Certainly, let me take you through an overview of the system”

 2013

Customer:  “Hey, I really like what you folks did with the switch-based Fibre Channel zoning in the last release of UCS Manager.  When does version 2.0 of UCS Central come out? We’re deploying UCS in three more data centers and I want to talk about implementing global ID pools”

Me:  “Fantastic.  Let me find our systems management expert.”

I speak geek pretty well, so when customers come in and want to go deeper than I can on operating the system instead of asking me “Cisco sells servers?”…I know we’re in the right place and on the right vector.   Thanks to the EMC and Cisco teams for putting on such a great event.

I’ll leave you with a photo here for a caption contest.  Leave your ideas in the comment section and try your best to keep it clean.  My first take is “I loved EMC World 2013 thiiiiiiiiiiiis much!”

Tags: data center, EMC, Servers, UCS, unified computing system, Vblock, vspex

3 years ago Cisco entered the server platform market with the Unified
Computing System (UCS). This server platform was built from the ground up
for virtualization and immediately started making an impact and gaining
market share. Today it holds the number 2 position worldwide for blades.

At this same time Cisco began to deepen its partnership with SAP. SAP
customers who had relied on Cisco for their networking gear looked to
expand the Cisco relationship by moving their SAP instances to UCS. SAP
HANA accelerated many of these customers move to UCS. Because SAP HANA
operated outside the bounds of the Data Center, it has allowed the
companies to look at UCS without affecting their current SAP instance
while proving UCS as a fast, reliable, scalable, cost reducing platform,
giving the customers confidence that Cisco UCS can more than handle the
mission-critical application workload

But that was just the beginning of the relationship between these two
giants. The diversity of both Cisco and SAP has allowed for a much more
strategic and far reaching relationship allowing each of us to expand our
business together.

SAP Afaria and Precision Retail in SAP’s mobility area combined with the
Cisco mobility and Cisco UCS platform business is bringing mobility to
the masses in a cost efficient way. In addition SAP has begun
collaboration with Cisco’s Jabber collaboration product again using UCS
as the basis platform for these products. Teamed together, Cisco’s and
SAP’s Cloud business has also made a big impact in the form of Vblock and
Flexpod.

Last but not least, Cisco, unlike its platform competitors, partners with
EMC and NetApp for the storage and SANS product in order to complete all
solutions with SAP. Customers enjoy the flexibility of these solutions
allowing them to keep the vendors they have already standardized on. An
added bonus to these customers is that it allows them to also maintain
their reseller relationships using the massive channel capabilities of
Cisco, where over 95 per cent of Cisco products are sold

Cisco and SAP recently completed a 20 city world wide SAP HANA and Cloud
road show generating millions of dollars of new revenue for both
companies. Cisco and SAP are the world leaders in their respective
areas, reinforcing their position in the market connecting the world in
the Internet of Things.

Tags: Cisco, SAP, SAP. HANA, UCS, unified computing system

Over 200 attendees were present for the opening of two different Co-Innovate Labs (COIL) recently. The COIL is charged with accelerating co-innovation within the SAP partner ecosystem.

This lab is part of the company’s global R&D network and it offers a hands-on environment for SAP, partners and customers to work together on current and future technologies.

The Co-Innovation Lab Singapore is located at SAP’s Asia headquarters in Singapore. It joins a global network of existing co-innovation facilities in Palo Alto (California, USA), São Paulo (Brazil), Walldorf (Germany), Moscow (Russia), Bangalore (India), Shanghai (China) and Tokyo (Japan).

SAP Co-Innovation Lab Singapore is supported by key technology partners Cisco, Intel, NetApp and VMware. Each company provided its latest generation of hardware and software products to the facility’s computing centre, which operates its own private cloud as well as the SAP HANA in-memory platform.

Co-Innovation Lab Singapore has already helped Singapore-based startup ZelRealm Interactive improve their solution, said the company. They developed Sogamo to help game developers optimise and better monetise their online games. Similarly, YFind Technologies, a Singapore-based company, is collaborating with SAP R&D and SAP Co-Innovation Labs to build a product that enables mobile shopping and checkout in retail stores and creates a social network in the supply chain in order to personalise offers and sense demands from customers in real-time for upstream suppliers.

The Coil Lab in Shanghai officially opened March 5th and will server the same purpose as the others around the globe

Cisco, with its Unified Computing System Server Platform and Enterprise Networking Products, and SAP, with SAP HANA, Business Suite, Precision Retail, and Jabber integration, continue to partner in order to bring the best solutions and collaborative products to the world.

Tags: Cisco, jabber, Precision Retail, SAP, SAP Business Suite, SAP. HANA, UCS, unified computing system

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

At the OpenStack Summit 2013, Red Hat announced RDO, a freely available, community-supported distribution of OpenStack. OpenStack is an open source cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter.

In addition to the new release, Red Hat also announced today the launch of an official Cloud Infrastructure Partner Program, “a multi-tiered program designed for third-party commercial companies that offer hardware, software and services for customers to implement cloud infrastructure solutions powered by Red Hat OpenStack.” I’m excited about the  solution opportunities that are possible by combining UCS and Nexus offerings  with Red Hat on the OpenStack cloud infrastructure.

Read the announcement here:

Red Hat OpenStack Announcement

Why is this a good fit for Cisco’s Customers?

Read More »

Tags: B-Series, C-Series, Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud, Cisco UCS, Cloud Computing, OpenStack, unified computing, unified computing system, Unified Data Center, Unified Fabric, unified management