Joann Starke

2 min read

Whether working with bare-metal servers or virtual machines; provisioning applications and infrastructure traditionally are independent tasks that are completed by different data center teams. Infrastructure is usually provisioned manually. Applications are customarily provisioned via golden templates. As customers look to move automation beyond infrastructure to include applications, the maintenance complexity and manual “last mile” configuration […]

2 min read

Major change and growth is happening in the way data centers are functioning. This change is being led by cloud technology. IT’s role is changing from an infrastructure provider to strategic business partner. The new role for IT is to align you with the services you need, when you need them, from a portfolio of […]

2 min read

Congratulations on your hot new project! It is critical to your organization expanding its revenue base; it’s top of mind for your manager and the CIO. What’s that? You did all the planning, but you can’t start for four weeks? Oh, right—that’s how long IT needs to get you the necessary infrastructure resources. Let’s change the perspective. […]

1 min read

Delivering unified management for converged infrastructure solutions, Cisco UCS Director is an award-winning choice for managing your vBlock, FlexPod or other converged infrastructure solution.  In previous blogs, I have mentioned the benefits of Cisco UCS Director: How it abstracts the virtualization, compute, network and storage layers into a single pane of glass that reduces the […]

2 min read

Cisco’s cloud software is a hot topic.  First Cisco UCS Director was voted the SVC award winner for best virtualization management software.  Then Forrester released a new Private Cloud Wave and both Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (IAC) and UCS Director combined garnered Cisco the highest ranking for cloud vision and strategy as well as […]

1 min read

Last night we received the news that Cisco UCS Director (formerly Cloupia) won the product of the year award in the category of virtualization management by the SVC Awards. Each year SVC rewards the top products, projects, companies and teams operating in the cloud, virtualization and storage sectors.  This SVC award provides validation of the […]

1 min read

If you have been following the news, I'm sure you saw that Cisco just introduced Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI). Combine ACI with Cisco UCS Director and you can...

1 min read

In order to provide important services and innovations that better align to business, data centers must deploy advancecd IT architectures. Who says? IDC. In fact, this month they reported that adoption of integrated systems has moved from evaluation to mainstream. And yet IT remains besieged. What is the essence of the problem? Traditional management tools. […]

2 min read

We have to propel new use cases for cloud because customers want more than IaaS. And they don’t want to be tied to vendors’ annual product release cycles to get it. But, as they extend cloud-based service delivery beyond IaaS and aim higher in the sky, their heads smack into the ceiling of cloud management. […]