Bill Shields

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Modernizing is about doing things differently in how you operate, manage, and consume your IT infrastructure. This blog discusses why you should modernize to meet your performance, flexibility, and agility business goals.

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Geographic Solutions provides a timely example of how well servers perform in the real world, and how capable they are in supporting continually changing business needs. And they did it on Cisco UCS servers.

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As we continue to create new extensions and value for Cisco Intersight, I’m pleased to announce a Tech Preview of our latest integration with Hitachi. This integration helps simplify and automate the orchestration of data centers leveraging Hitachi storage and underlying VMware datastores. A SaaS management platform, Intersight helps eliminate operational siloes and provides visibility, […]

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Servers exist to run applications that solve business, technical, and scientific problems. Some applications will benefit from clock speed improvements while others will see benefits from additional memory.

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What if there was a way to supersize your server memory capacity? Even better, what if that memory was not only fast, but persistent? Read on to learn about how you can get more performance out of your storage and RAM.

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On May 31st, Cisco announced the C4200 Multinode Chassis and C125 M5 server. Some of you may have been taking that week off due to Memorial Day. And I bet even more of you had the temerity to take a nice summer vacation and didn’t notice our new server. So I wanted to write another blog to catch everyone up about the C4200.

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The C480 ML M5 rack server supports eight NVIDIA V100 GPUs with their NVLink technology. The NVIDIA Tesla V100 is the world’s first GPU to break the 100 teraflops barrier of deep learning performance with a whopping 640 Tensor Cores.

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  Today, guest blogger Nikul Sheth, Sr. Product Manager for Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnect writes about our new 4th gen fabric. Our next evolution of Cisco UCS Fabric provides...

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Building Scale-Out Storage solutions can be now fully automated to reduce the overall amount of work and to easily scale software-defined storage environments within minutes. Partners and customers can begin to leverage this capability using Ansible modules and playbooks for UCS Manager.

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Other server vendors offer multinode servers, only Cisco offers you a system: UCS is a fabric-centric architecture with a centralized management model, manageable with a single tool, Cisco Intersight.

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How much could you save by switching to Cisco UCS? Our Public TCO Tool can give you guidance.

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Many of you know Lauren Malhoit our incredible co-host of TechWiseTV. She asked for my help getting this blog out and who am...

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When we announced our new M5 servers, we posted six new world record benchmarks. This late last week received confirmation of three more world records.     SPECjBB®2015 MultijVM – #1 4-socket server result for critical-jOPS. The Cisco UCS C480 M5 delivered 229,029 – a 78% increase when compared to Cisco’s previous result #1 result.1 […]

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Tuesday we announced our fifth generation of Cisco UCS servers. Today, I want to take a deeper look at the M5 rack servers. If you are interested in our new blade offerings, check out my blog from yesterday. We put our hard drive sleds on a diet and the C220 M5 bulked up. Customers asked […]

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Yesterday we announced our fifth generation of UCS servers. Today I want to take a deeper look at the M5 blade servers. Tomorrow, I’ll tackle the M5 rack servers. More! More! More! The B200 M5 Blade Server has more of everything you love. More cores, more memory, more GPUs. Based on the Intel® Xeon® Scalable […]

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Contributing author: Vijay Durairaj Today we are announcing our latest generation of UCS servers based on the Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor family and 6 industry standard world record benchmarks. Since Cisco first entered the server business, we’ve been setting records and our new M5 servers are no exception. For details on the new Cisco UCS M5 […]

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Late last year, I compared Cisco’s S3260 Storage Server to Amazon’s S3 service. The results shocked a lot of people and spurred a lot comments on the blog.

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Last week, I discussed the economics of on-premises storage using the S3260 Storage Server vs. the cloud. Net net, the S3260 is 56% less expensive. Today, I wanted to talk about server consolidation of multiple 2RU rackmount servers on to a S3260. Yes, I’m going to try and sell you fewer servers. 2RU rackmount server […]

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If you’ve read any of my past blogs, you’ll know I focus a lot on the economic impact of Cisco UCS. Today I’m comparing the TCO of hosting data intensive workloads on-prem vs. in the public cloud. What started out as a 2RU rackmount consolidation discussion (more on that next week) turned into a public cloud […]

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Intel® recently released a white paper on FFmpeg Linux transcoding performance with Intel Quick Sync Video using the Intel Media Server Studio on the Intel Xeon® E3-1285L v4 processor.

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Yesterday, Girish blogged about the new Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 v4 product family and Cisco’s world record benchmark performance. Today, I want to update you on the changes to UCS Mini and our M-Series Modular Servers.

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Do you need a server and storage solution for your remote sites, to ensure that your business critical applications are always available? Cisco and StorMagic have a solution for you.

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Tuesday Girish blogged about the new UCS Innovations and at the end of this post there is a list of other blogs with more details on other updates. Today I’ll go a bit more in-depth on what’s new for UCS Mini & M-Series Modular Servers.  

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If you are one of the 330,000 organizations using Citrix XenApp (or if you are considering it) you need to consider Cisco’s UCS M-Series modular servers. What are M-Series modular servers? M-Series servers are composable infrastructure that disaggregates storage and networking from the CPU/memory complex allowing workloads to be optimally matched to resources. An ideal […]

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When we launched UCS Mini, it pushed us into new territory with an exciting offering that bundles servers, storage and networking into a single solution — much like the traditional UCS — but in a smaller form factor and lowered the cost of entry to a UCS solution. It allows customers of any size (SMB, […]

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Cisco UCS M-Series Modular Servers deliver exceptional value for online content delivery like gaming, web serving, transcoding, and HPC. Built around Cisco’s virtual interface card (VIC) technology and the policy-based management of UCS Manager, this new design brings the award-winning architecture and management of Cisco Unified Computing to the world of parallelized workloads.

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IT infrastructures are increasingly complex and include a broad range of technologies and platforms hosted in physical, virtual and cloud environments. Cisco UCS has become a world leading server platform in large part because the unique UCS architecture enables organization to harness the power of virtualization and dramatically simplify infrastructure management. Splunk is a great […]

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On the way to tradeshow week (May 4th), I decided to do a brief blog series on UCS Mini tied to these shows. Last week was Microsoft Ignite. This week SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference in Orlando and the discussion of UCS Mini for SAP and SAP HANA.

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When we launched UCS Mini back in September, it pushed us into new territory with an exciting offering that bundles servers, storage and networking into a single solution — much like the traditional UCS — but in a smaller form factor. It also allowed Cisco to effectively target branch or remote offices and the mid-market with […]

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This week, Cisco is at three industry tradeshows (Microsoft Ignite booth #122, SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference booth #330, and EMC World booth #221). Next week is Citrix Synergy in Orlando.

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On the way to tradeshow week (May 4th), I decided to do a brief blog series on UCS Mini tied to these shows. I’ve covered Microsoft Ignite and SAPPHIRE NOW in the past two weeks. Last up, EMC World in Las Vegas.

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Since Cisco UCS Mini launched last September, Cisco and our partners (Citrix, EMC, Microsoft, NetApp, Nimble Storage, Oracle, SAP, and VMware) have been hard at work putting together a wide variety of solutions. On the way to tradeshow week (May 4th), I’ll be doing a brief blog series on UCS Mini tied to these shows.

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Cisco is pleased to announce the latest version of the UCS Manager Plug-In for Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c (OEM).  This new version (12.1.0.9.0) is posted on the Cisco Communities website. The plug-in provides health monitoring and status checking.

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The JD Edwards Summit brings together over 700 business partners from around the world for a week of product updates, industry discussions and intense training.  A number of vendors were asked to present solutions that are specific to this customer base.  Cisco and Nimble Storage presented the UCS Mini based SmartStack solution where the entry […]

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Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC) announced the winners of the 2014 infoTECH Spotlight Data Center Excellence Awards today. Cisco is honored that UCS Mini is one of the recipients! To quote from the TMC press release: “The 2014 infoTECH Spotlight Data Center Excellence Award recognizes the most innovative and enterprising data center vendors who offer infrastructure […]

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I’ve written a number of blogs on the economic value of Cisco UCS and how it is changing the economics of the datacenter. Now, for the first time we performed a TCO comparison of our new VersaStack solution and how it stacks up versus the competition. The VersaStack solution combines the innovation of Cisco UCS […]