Data Center

When customers look to deploy their Hadoop solutions, one of the first questions they ask is, which distro should we run it on? For many enterprise customers, the answer has been MapR. For those of you not familiar with MapR, they offer an enterprise-grade Hadoop software solution that provides cust…

Many organizations are getting on board with the cloud. But the transition can be tough. There are many aspects to consider before going virtual, including security, possible downtime, application migration, and ease of deployment. So where do you start? Cisco has the answers and expertise that you…

In a recent interview, the Director of IT Operations at a New York based Enterprise said that one of the biggest problems he was facing was maintaining customer satisfaction on performance as the data deluge grew unabated.  According to an IDC 2012 report “..Data creation is taking place at an unpre…

Service Financial Management is the focus of Domain 6 in Cisco Services‘ DomainTenSM Model for Data Center and Cloud Transformation. Closely related to the User Portal (Domain 4) and Service Catalog and Management (Domain 5), service financial management is one of those organizationally challe…

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…

So this is the Million Dollar Question, right? You, along with the executives sponsoring your particular VDI project wanna know: How many desktops can I run on that blade? It’s funny how such an “it depends” question becomes a benchmark for various vendors blades, including said ve…

Unification is a big deal for Adena Health Systems, a medical center with multiple Ohio locations. The company’s data center was running on disparate technology that was causing outages, neglecting incoming calls, and slowing business. With some tough competition nearby, Adena’s aging infrastructure…

The saying “you’ve gotta give credit where credit is due” is exceptionally literal for Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. Recently becoming recognized as one of the most successful academic institutions in the country, Liberty University can thank its ability to support the huge influx of st…

Updated 3/2/20313 Big Data is quickly becoming a critical priority for enterprises across all verticals.  Yet, there is currently a lack of any means of fair comparability of performance and price-performance of underlying platforms. The Big Data Benchmarking Community established last year to fill…