Cisco Data Center
F5 Agility 2015: Next Stop Down Under
In a few weeks Spring season will set in, and it’ll be a Ripper Down Under. For the Data Center technology geeks there is plenty of action in store to celebrate the onset of Aussie spring. I am talking about F5 Agility that is getting ready to rock Melbourne (Aug 18) and Sydney (Aug 20) Just last…
A Tour of Cisco’s Allen Data Center
As a consultant I have seen many different ‘Data Centers’, from Co-location facilities, to in house and well thought out, to a dirty closet that no one was using. Douglas Alger gave us a tour of Cisco’s Data Center in Allen, TX about a month ago. I was expecting to be impressed and I was not disappo…
Flipping the 70-30 IT OPEX Model On Its Head
In today’s always on and connected, Internet of Things environments, IT is taking center stage to optimize business operations. Many IT organizations allocate 70% or more of their budgets to simply keeping their operations up and running. It’s been like this for a long time, and there are many good…
#EngineersUnplugged S7|E3 The IOPS Don’t Lie!
In this episode, Matt Brender (@mjbrender) and Rick Vanover (@RickVanover) give us an overview of why you should let your IOPS tell the truth! Ever wonder if your expectations for the modern Data Center match the reality? Matt and Rick go through the math and thinking for what your storage systems…
Cisco Keynote – End-to-End Optimization for Today’s Modern Datacenters
Have a bit of free time this Wednesday morning? If so please feel free to sit in on a Cisco keynote delivered by Mark Balch, Director of Cisco UCS Product Management, as he outlines the challenges faced and the discoveries made with the UCS family and how it has driven revolutionary change and busin…
Hard Choices !
Sorry .. I did not mean to steal the title of Hillary Clinton’s book. It so happened that we had to deal with “hard choices” of our own, when we had to decide on the management approach to our new M-Series platform. In the first blog of the UCS M-Series Modular Servers journey ser…
UCS M-Series System Link Technology: The converged infrastructure story.
It almost feels like this blog entry should start with: Once upon a time…. Because it captures a journey of a young emerging technology and the powerful infrastructure tool it has become. The Cisco UCS journey starts with the tale of Unified Fabric and the Converged Network Adapter (CNA). Most peo…
New Nexus 9300 Switches join the Nexus 9000 Series
It’s an exciting time in to be in our industry, especially as we witness how technology continues to reshape how we connect and communicate through a myriad of applications and devices not only within our own companies, but also with our customers and partners. At the epicenter of this technological…
UCS M-Series Design Principles – Why bigger is not necessarily better!
Cisco UCS M-Series servers have been purpose built to fit specific need in the data center. The core design principles are around sizing the compute node to meet the needs of cloud scale applications. When I was growing up I used to watch a program on PBS called 3-2-1 Contact, most afternoons, when…