Simpler IT Management Increases the Effectiveness of Advanced Technologies

Advanced technology assists your business on its journey to becoming more efficient and agile so it can keep serving the rising expectations of customers.  But, how can you help these advanced technologies serve your business well?

Technology headlines focus on the individual tools to help you support advanced technologies; but the pivotal reality is that the foundation for all such technologies is your data center infrastructure.  If your infrastructure cannot meet the speed and flexibility needs of these new technologies, they won’t help your business become more efficient or agile.

The good news is that Cisco has made automating your infrastructure straight forward with Cisco UCS Director.  This solution replaces manual tools and processes with automated workflows to deliver infrastructure resources within minutes.  It reduces data center operational complexity across Cisco and multi-vendor infrastructure components.

Need proof?

In 2014, Principled Technologies released a report that describes how Cisco UCS Director significantly reduces steps and time to provision six servers.  In this report, Principled Technologies documents an 88% reduction in the number of steps, when compared to manual provisioning, and a 13% decrease in the time to set up each individual server.

But your business runs on more than just servers, what about the rest of your data center resources?

Glad you asked.

In a brand new report, Principled Technologies tested Cisco UCS Director’s provisioning and management across a complete infrastructure stack:  compute, network, storage and virtualization.  To better mirror real-life, the test data center was composed of multi-vendor infrastructure components.

The composition of the test data center included:

• Two Cisco UCS B200 blades
• Cisco Invicta and EMC VNX 5500 storage
• Cisco MDS multi-fabric switch
• HP BladeSystem c7000 containing two ProLiant BL460 blades

Appendix A of the report provides detailed specifications on the configuration of the test environment.

Here’s what they discovered:

• UCS Director deployed a heterogeneous environment with 100 VMware virtual machines in only four steps
• UCS Director reduced user error risk by automating common data center tasks. The result was consistent, error-free resources.
• UCS Director’s unified management interface significantly reduced operational complexity
• Multi-vendor chassis and blade infrastructures were easily integrated into Cisco UCS Director’s interface.  The single management platform allows IT to perform automation, bare-metal provisioning and management tasks.

Without UCS Director, IT would need to create what amounts to a homegrown management solution using a mix of vendor-specific tools.

Data center resources provide the groundwork for your business. If IT is slow, your business suffers.  Cisco UCS Director delivers significant value with centralized provisioning and management of Cisco and multi-vendor infrastructure resources, which allows you to gain the benefits of advanced technologies so your business can become more agile.

Read the report and learn how Cisco UCS Director can deliver faster, simpler management to your heterogeneous data center.