Were you surprised?     Probably not.     Tracking Time with UCS – Last 3 Years of Market Share Growth:   5 years 3 months ago Cisco announced UCS 5 years ago, Cisco started shipping UCS. Today UCS is #1 in the US and in the Americas.     What made UCS so successful? What is the real s…

Every server manufacturer has a Server TCO tool, of sorts. Why do I say “of sorts”? Because rather than a straightforward approach to TCO, some tools color the input parameters with fixed pre-sets, conditions and assumptions. Certainly every tool has some assumptions and pre-sets; they just need to…

I recently wrote a blog titled Blade Server TCO and Architecture – You Cannot Separate Them and thought a little more on the architecture side would be a good thing.  With so much misinformation (dis-information?) about UCS running around in the ether, I thought the straight forward comparison offer…

At some point, every data center has to migrate a complete server identity between two servers.  This could be driven by maintenance needs, server upgrades or DR/HA and SLA requirements.  For DR/HA, Business Continuity requirements mandate that this be done as quickly as possible, which means automa…

I have heard this a lot over the years, in one way or another – “The only price that really counts is what I actually pay for my server.”  Alright, so why bother with a TCO analysis?  The truth is that server acquisition costs only contribute 20% (or less) to a 3 year server TCO.  Management and ot…

Deploying new servers is a routine task in data centers. Whether it is tied to server refreshes, net new compute initiatives or to an expansion of existing compute capacity, adding new servers can be a time consuming activity for IT personnel.  This server deployment process has historically been ve…

‘Tis the Season – for Events and Trade Shows Make sure to visit the Cisco booth and talk to the team about Cisco UCS Servers Well, we are officially deep into the IT and Data Center event and trade show season.  This is a great time for Cisco and a tremendous opportunity for us to meet and talk wit…

Fabric-Based Infrastructure and Cisco UCS A good segue to Fabric-Based Infrastructure is Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Blade Servers (March 2012), by Andrew Butler and George Weiss.  To fully understand the tie in with Fabric-Based Infrastructure I suggest reading the section on Cisco UCS.  Their obs…