Chances are that if your data center looks anything like the typical infrastructure we see on a day to day basis, you may be wasting money. I’d like to apologize if that seems rather straightforward, but it’s the truth. The deployment of virtualized environments facilitated by traditional blade server architectures is a movement that continues to be adopted by more and more companies. Like anything else, the devil is in the details – and the details aren’t being weighed appropriately.
How much does it cost to power your data center? How much do you spend on keeping your servers cooled? What type of fiscal investment is being appropriated towards cabling and adapters? How much overhead are you dedicating just to manage the hardware? How many IT resources need to be available to maintain stability?
Studies have shown that over 70% of total IT budgeting is allocated just to “keep the lights on.” Consider the fact that your IT infrastructure and resources, at a base level, are responsible for enabling the agility within your walls. This means that your time may be needlessly spent on simple things like managing server faults and failures. Cisco, as always, has taken a forward-thinking approach to the way your data center can be converted to a more efficient operations center, and has embedded that intelligence into their Unified Computing System (UCS).
“Nobody gets fired for buying Cisco.” This is a phrase that gets heard over and over at the water cooler in your IT department. The reason behind this is that Cisco always thinks of their technology from the customer’s perspective and aims to trivialize the larger challenges that companies face in their day to day operations. This methodology has earned Cisco a deep well of trust within the IT community, and this trust continues with Cisco UCS – specifically when leveraging Cisco UCS with a VDI deployment. Connection recently focused on the differentiation in two videos featured in our Chalk Talk series – The Revolution: Cisco UCS for VDI and Obtaining VDI Success.
Cisco UCS was designed with VDI at the very top of mind. Cisco UCS implements a 10Gb fabric from the ground up, which means all of the extraneous and disparate management needed to run a typical blade deployment just simply goes away. With your SAN and LAN merged, all of a sudden you don’t need robust, expensive, top-of-rack switching just to manage a single chassis. Cisco UCS enables the capability to flash different server profiles across your architectures, and to manage each piece of hardware without having to individually reconfigure each policy independently. It allows for the flexibility of a VDI deployment to extend past the software and into the data center hardware. Take all of this and combine it with a single pane of glass management system – which makes deployment and resource provisioning easier than it’s ever been – and you can see why Cisco went from not manufacturing servers 5 years ago to being the #1 x86 blade server manufacturer in the Americas today.
Some of the key benefits of Cisco UCS include:
- 2/3rds reduction in total overheard for a VDI deployment on a Blade server platform
- Full recovery from a failed server takes just 3-10 minutes
- Expanded memory capacity for more VDI sessions possible per server deployed
- 87% reduction in provisioning times
- 77% reduction in cabling
- 53% reduction of power and cooling costs
Simply put, Cisco UCS with VDI continues to drive the future of your business into a realm where everything is more efficient, transparent, and simpler to manage. It enables your agility, and in turn, allows you to react drastically faster in an IT landscape where everything is mobile and new applications might need to be provisioned in minutes instead of days. More than 85% of all Fortune 500 customers have invested in Cisco UCS, and taken advantage of the 100 world record performance benchmarks that Cisco UCS provides.
If you would like to know more about what the interoperability of Cisco UCS and VDI can do for you, check out these recent Chalk Talk videos. And when you’re ready to go a step further, remember that Connection is a Cisco Gold Partner. We understand that the future of the data center isn’t coming, it’s already here. We’d love to have a conversation with you about how we can help cement your place in that future.
