Tag Archives: UCS
The cost of Cisco UCS?
Lately I have been having a lot of discussions around Cisco UCS and the common theme of these meetings tends to be "My traditional servers cost much less."
A lot of times there is a misconception of what's included with Cisco UCS compared to what's included when purchasing traditional servers. UCS is more about a server architecture and less about just your typical server blade, so you need to factor in more components when comparing it to a traditional servers.
Below is a summary of components that you should consider when comparing the cost of Cisco UCS to traditional servers.
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What’s the “Big Deal” about Cisco UCS ver 2.0 Fabric?
What's the "big deal" about Cisco UCS ver 2.0 fabric? Two words: bandwidth and flexibility.
Cisco recently expanded the UCS product line to include an additional Fabric Interconnect (model 6248), an additional Chassis IO Module (model 2208), as well as software release 2.0 with many new features. The new 2.0 components support existing chassis and server blades, and are back-compatible to inter-operate with existing first-generation UCS hardware (in original modes of use.)
Although the new models need not obsolete the original hardware, many of the recent Cisco UCS deployments by Ahead have opted to take advantage of the benefits of the new components.
The new 6248 Fabric Interconnect packs 48 Unified Ports into a 1 RU form factor. Any of the base Unified Ports may be configured to ...
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Vblock or Flexpod (Part IV)
This is Part IV in Four Part Series discussing VCE Vblock and NetApp FlexPod technology and marketing approach. Links to the other articles can be found at the bottom of this document.
The goal of this series was to really foster a discussion around whether or not a “stack” makes sense moving forward as a design tenet for your datacenter. If the answer is yes, and you are comparing VCE Vblock to the NetApp FlexPod as potential solutions for your environment, what are the deciding factors that should help you make a decision choosing one over the other.
In the original post, I listed a number of questions or initial consideration points around use case, existing infrastructure, speed to market, vendor support, technology attributes, flexibility, scalability etc. ...
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Let’s Build a House (prelude to FlexPod or Vblock)
This is a prelude to a Four Part Series discussing VCE Vblock and NetApp FlexPod technology and marketing approach. Links to the other articles can be found at the bottom of this document.
Let’s Build a House
Let’s step back from technology for a couple of minutes and take a look at a different topic. Let’s talk about home-building. There are lots of ways to build a house. For the sake of this analogy, let’s assume that you as the reader have three options when it comes to building a home:
Do it Yourself
That’s right – you are pretty knowledgeable when it comes to building design and architecture, you like to roll up your sleeves and do a lot of work, you have money to
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Vblock or FlexPod? (Part III)
This is Part III in a Four Part Series discussing VCE Vblock and NetApp FlexPod technology and marketing approach. Links to the other articles can be found at the bottom of this document.
Most customers that I meet with (technologists or executives) are pretty tired of hearing about the “cloud.” Likely the most ever over-used buzz-word in IT, cloud means so many things to so many people (or doesn’t) that a better definition is required to help drive datacenter virtualization conversations.
EMC started their push for “Private Cloud” in 2009 in order to drive the concept that it is possible to get the positive attributes of “public cloud” without taking on the risks or downside that are typically ...
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Vblock or FlexPod? (Part II)
This is Part II in a Four Part Series discussing VCE Vblock and NetApp FlexPod technology and marketing approach. Links to the other articles can be found at the bottom of this document.
In the introduction to this series, I outlined a number of considerations that typically play into conversations around whether a customer should look at building a “stack” of infrastructure compute. The most heavily marketed and most mature “stacks” today are the VCE Vblock and NetApp’s FlexPod. Prior to digging into the questions around flexibility and investment, I wanted to take a couple of minutes to talk about each infrastructure stack. Specific focus areas include: what they are, how they are similar, how they are different, and ...
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Vblock or FlexPod? (Part I)
This is Part I in a Four Part Series discussing VCE Vblock and NetApp FlexPod technology and marketing approach. Links to the other articles can be found at the bottom of this document.
(Before I get started - it's probably a good idea to provide full disclosure that I used to work at EMC - as a practice lead in the Datacenter Virtualization Practice - so, I have a pretty good history of the evolution of Vblock from a couple of different perspectives.)
Over the last couple of months, I have been in a dozen or so customer meetings where the conversation has either touched or centered on the "stack wars" around building complete or partial datacenter infrastructure solutions for ...
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