UCS

With the World Cup games recently finished, I’m reminded of how rampantly soccer has swept across the U.S. in the last few years. Kids often start quite young — there are leagues for even five and six year olds! One element that helps younger kids enjoy their first soccer experience is that the ball…

Most of us expect immediate delivery both as consumers and as employees. As employees, we are no longer willing to wait weeks for IT to deliver what we need. IT departments feel the pain that ensues from our urgency in the form of shadow IT.  Shadow IT results in the double trouble of higher risk an…

Cisco Achieves SAP HANA Certifications for Unified Computing Systems Mission-Critical Servers Cisco has received SAP HANA certification for its Unified Computing Systems (UCS) mission-critical servers with the Intel Ivy Bridge chip set.  All of these products are now listed on the Product Availabili…

In the second part of my blog series I want to cover one of the main concerns that Services Providers are facing as they explore moving to NFV and that is performance and scalability. Common concerns I hear center around latency, throughput, queuing capabilities and security. These are valid concern…

Recently I was speaking to someone (Mike from New Jersey) at Cisco Live and they were raving about their journey to the Flexpod. They were seeking the best compute, networking and storage yet didn’t want to be boggled down with details when it came to the purchasing process. Converged systems like t…

In part one of this series we covered the internals of HDDs, in part two we went over the internals of SSD, In part three we continue reviewing storage concepts to refresh or learn the right lingo. Lets start by understanding “Redundant Array of Independent Disks” (RAID). There are RAID levels like…

Arguably 2014 is already turning out to be a big year for cloud. Some have even called it “The Year of the Cloud.” Cloud implementation continues to play an essential role in overall IT strategy: A recent report says 80% of cloud adopters saw improvements within 6 months of moving to the cloud.…

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…

Look at the operating costs for your data centers and you’ll likely see a big amount for the electrical power to run the servers, storage, networking components, and cooling systems. Since power consumption is an area where even small changes can add up to big savings over time, we want to take adva…