Bill Shields

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 […]

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.

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.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Cisco’s Unified Computing System, originally designed for the datacenter is now optimized for Branch Office / Remote Office (ROBO), point-of-sale, and smaller IT environments with the announcement today of UCS Mini.  This solution delivers servers, storage, and 10 Gigabit networking in an easy to deploy, compact form factor. Expandable to 15 servers, UCS Mini provides […]

To highlight the power and ease of use of the UCS PowerTool SDK and XML, a Windows PowerShell scripting contest was run from March 27th to May 11th. Championed by Technical Marketing Engineers Eric Williams and Jeff Foster, the contest exceeded its goals with 24 scripts submitted. The most popular category was configuring a new […]

The UCS Power Scripting Contest closed on May 11th and the five finalists were announced at Microsoft TechEd today. They are: