Some things were just meant to be together. Chaz and Dave. Fish and chips. Vardy and Mahrez (well, perhaps last season…).
Two’s company when it comes to life and love (if this has jolted your memory, get your free techie Valentine’s Day cards here).
Yet three’s never a crowd when it comes to investing in your data centre.
Take compute, storage and network. Back in the day, you had to buy all of these separately.
Then came converged infrastructure with the full stack of data centre technologies combined into pre-engineered, tested and supported systems that operate as a whole.
Beauty’s in the eye of the beholder
We launched the world’s first Unified Computing System (UCS) in 2009. Based on standard x86 technology, UCS was, and still is a recognised game-changer. It’s one that significant others have yet to replicate successfully.
The beauty of UCS lies in its flexibility and simplicity. You can deploy one type of solution for one set of needs, and a different solution for other workloads. Crucially, you get to choose and we make it easy to deploy and manage all your choices in a consistent way.
From individual servers to integrated and hyperconverged systems, UCS means you can choose from a family of solutions designed to work together – not just from Cisco, but a host of trusted vendors too.
For example, if you’ve invested in network-attached storage (NAS) or storage area network (SAN), we’ve combined UCS and Nexus switches with solutions from partners including IBM (VersaStack), NetApp (FlexPod), Nimble Storage (SmartStack), Pure Storage (FlashStack) and VCE (Vblock), plus many others.
UCS has garnered a sizable end user base. More than 50,000 admirers globally rely on its simplicity, speed and reliability to support their daily operations. And when it comes to performance, it’s a world beater.
Pursue your vision
There are many vendors that have made UCS a core building block for their converged solutions too. Others use it to power their hyperconverged and cloud offerings.
As we’ve said before, there’s nothing better than the real thing. Of all the reasons to love UCS, the real clincher is the versatility it gives you to pursue your IT vision.
You can manage many technologies with a path to software defined networking (SDN), automation, orchestration and hybrid cloud.
Virtualisation and hybrid models mean there’s never been a better time to invest in an on-premise platform that delivers cloud-like agility (on demand, as a service) and economics (pay only for what you use).
Virtualisation enables pools of compute and storage resources to optimise the underlying infrastructure, so apps no longer need to map to a single physical server (or set of servers) or storage device.
Hybrid Cloud delivers virtual machines (VMs), containers, network, compute and storage as-a-service. The application and workloads are no longer tied to a single VM, server, data centre or even cloud.
Organisations adopting this hybrid model in themselves become agile IT as-a-service providers. So while buying hardware can sometimes feel like a hard sell in today’s as a service world when you consider the challenges faced, it doesn’t have to be when you put the power of unified computing at the heart of your data centre.
Get Messe and let us woo you in Berlin
With Cisco Live! getting ready to rock at the Messe Berlin, we’ll have a whole host of data centre innovations on show, including:
- How to turn the lights on in your data centre with Tetration Analytics
- Explore the next generation data centre with the Innovation Talk
- Learn about the Cisco Integrated System for Microsoft Azure Stack
- See how the Nexus 9000 series is evolving to enhance today’s social, mobile, cloud and app-centric world (or how it makes a fine Valentine’s gift for your business)
- Watch HyperFlex 2.0 drop Hyperconvergence into top gear
Go here for making the most of IT at Cisco Live EMEA. There’s still time to register.
See you there!
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