We had fun with last week’s post, I Saw What You Patched Last Summer, viewing the horrors that are the entries to Cisco’s recent Crazy Cabling Contest Fun because, as humorist Will Rogers famously noted, everything is funny as long as it is happening to someone else.
You obviously don’t want such cabling mayhem in your Data Center. Tangled cables greatly increase the risk of accidental downtime. They also inhibit airflow, forcing a Data Center’s cooling system to work harder to deliver chilled air to hardware and thereby increasing energy consumption and operational costs.
For those keeping score at home, here’s the winning submission as voted by visitors to Cisco’s Facebook page:
The top vote-getter from Cisco's Crazy Cabling Contest.
Messy cabling is also bad because it leads to more messy cabling. Have you ever walked into a Data Center with just one sloppy server cabinet? In my experience, server environments are either neat and tidy throughout or messy throughout.
So, what can be done to prevent tangled cabling in your Data Center?
What is “in-memory”? “In memory” is a technology that takes Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence to a different level. CIO’s want information at their fingertips. In order to obtain that information, they engage in data modeling and “what if” scenarios, the answers of which give them a competitive edge in business. The biggest concern to-date, is that the data modeling and “what if” scenarios usually take days to process. SAP HANA in-memory technology allows CIO’s to obtain answers to these complex issues in microseconds instead of the typical wait of days.
Who are the only server platform vendors certified to sell SAP HANA?
Cisco
Dell
Fujitsu
HP
IBM
What are the benefits to users of SAP HANA?
Processes all transactions in memory instead of I/O to disk
Processes millions of lines of data in microseconds
All processing done outside of normal data processing
Reduction of hardware and maintenance costs since SAP HANA is self contained in one appliance
So is SAP HANA “in Memory” technology disruptive? Absolutely. Watch Rajiv Thomas’s Video Cisco and SAP HANA about HANA
Sometimes, progress necessitates that we look at things in an entirely new light. To paraphrase Star Trek—if you want to do something groundbreaking, sometimes you have to go boldly where no one has gone before.
Against that backdrop, I wanted to dispel a recent rumor in the marketplace that Cisco has gone (warp drives engaged, presumably) to a place called “Planet Zircon” to sell its industry-first and industry-leading Unified Computing System (UCS).
Leaving aside for a moment that some of our competitors seem to be living in an alternate universe, UCS is actually selling quite well right here on planet Earth. Our architecture for the virtualized data center, whereby via UCS we unify servers, storage access, networks, and virtualization technologies to drive the value of data center infrastructure to an entirely new level, has gained acceptance from a great number of earthly companies.
But since we’re having fun with science fiction metaphors, let’s suppose you were a time traveler who went back to sneak a peek as Cisco first began developing UCS. You might be forgiven for thinking that Cisco had taken leave of its senses. But leaving planet Earth? No, our feet were firmly planted here.
Our Technical Marketing Engineers (TMEs) have delivered a library of technical videos, accompanied with voiceover explanations in clear, simple English, to show you how the Unified Computing System really works. Taken as a whole, this library provides a great functional tour of UCS, but it’s broken down into very digestible, well-defined topics so that you can zero in on topics and features of particular interest.
It has been a long winter for many of us. Nevertheless, the snow is finally melting and it’s an entirely new season for Qwest and Cisco.
Qwest has implemented the Cisco Unified Service Delivery (USD) solution across its CyberCenters. Qwest CyberCentersSM provide a highly-secure, reliable, scalable foundation for the delivery of state-of-the-art hosting for mission-critical enterprise application services.
Qwest VP of Product Management and National Network Services, Eric Bozich, talks about how
Cisco Unified Service Delivery brings new flexibility to cloud service delivery.
The Cisco USD solution helps Qwest optimize its CyberCenter network, application, compute and storage resources, while reducing capital, operating, real estate and energy costs. This creates new economies of scale for Qwest and attractive pay-per-use business models for their enterprise customers. The Cisco Unified Service Delivery is helping Qwest to change the game by bringing new levels of service agility to the cloud.
