Cisco Records 10,000 UCS Customers in Two Years

Cisco Systems Inc. announced that in just over two years its Unified Computing System, (Cisco UCS) which integrates compute, networking, management and virtualization, has captured the attention of data center managers and CIOs alike. Over 10,000 customers worldwide, including 3,000 in Europe, have deployed UCS.

Many industry observers were skeptical that a new computing technology could take hold in this competitive market, but the cost and business benefits proved compelling across all industries and all workloads. Since it began shipping in July 2009, UCS has captured 53 industry benchmark performance world records, and garnered a dozen industry awards for innovation.

According to a recent Servers and Virtualization Study by TheInfoPro, Cisco took the lead among server vendors in vision, technical innovation, product performance, and sales force. Cisco was named by 33 percent as the most exciting server vendor, eight percentage points ahead of the second placed vendor. 

The 2011 Cisco Cloud Index forecasts that cloud computing is transforming business: over 50 percent of computing workloads in data centers are predicted to be cloud-based by 2014, and global cloud traffic will grow over 12 times by 2015, to 1.6 zettabytes per year - the equivalent of over four days of business-class video for every person on earth. This explosive cloud growth requires the data center capabilities provided by UCS to support end-to-end cloud application delivery.

Designed with a 'clean slate' approach, UCS is an integrated system, designed to optimize compute, networking, storage access, virtualization and management. It tapped into a market demand for a new approach to computing, enabling IT organizations to unleash new business models with its integrated architecture. Customers are able to reduce the time to deploy new applications, improve business agility and reduce costs.

UCS is a fabric computing platform that combines industry-standard, x86-architecture servers with networking and storage access into an integrated system. Cisco works with infrastructure and software vendors, including BMC, CA, Citrix, EMC, Hitachi Data System, Microsoft, NetApp, Oracle, Red Hat, SAP, VMware to provide pre-tested, end-to-end solutions.

Cisco UCS Customers
Monsanto Company, a provider of agricultural technology that helps farmers produce more crops using fewer resources, initially deployed UCS to host virtualization for its SAP applications with VMware, which allowed them to reduce 160 physical application servers to just 12 UCS blades hosting 200 SAP Virtual Machines. Monsanto's data center refresh project further expanded the UCS footprint to support additional applications such as Oracle and Weblogic; with 80 UCS blades now supporting 1600 Virtual machines and plans for continued expansion.

"By taking advantage of UCS's integrated fabric capabilities and unique service profiles we've reduced power by 35 kilowatts, eliminated hundreds of LAN cables and SAN ports, and created a highly available and agile application environment to support virtualization and especially Virtual Machine mobility," said Todd Eyrick, business alignment and strategy lead, Global Infrastructure, Monsanto. "UCS Service Profiles, which allow us to assign characteristics for both physical and virtual services using a software template, are key to achieving our goal in delivering an IaaS model."

Euronet Worldwide, Inc., provider of secure electronic financial transaction solutions, established the first independent ATM network in Central and Eastern Europe. It processes more than $50 billion in ATM, prepaid and money transfer payments for more than 115 financial institutions, 200 mobile operators, 320,000 retailer and agent locations, and millions of individual consumers in 46 countries. With the help of SandT Consulting Hungary, Euronet deployed Cisco UCS combined with NetApp and VMware technologies in a joint solution for its central data center located in Hungary, which supports transaction processing for Euronet subsidiaries in 26 countries throughout Central and Eastern Europe.

"We needed a cloud infrastructure that could help us respond quickly to constantly changing business needs and scale capacity on demand," said Suresh Nandihalli, chief operating officer, Euronet EFT Europe. "This deeply integrated solution gives us a lower total cost of ownership, better return on investment, and a much more agile infrastructure to support our business applications and help us address business challenges and tasks."

The Chinese University of Hong Kong centralized and virtualized its information technology resources by deploying Cisco Unified Data Center architecture with Cisco Unified Computing System and Nexus switches to streamline data center management, provision computer resources more rapidly, and enhance computing power for academic users, especially for medical and scientific research.

"Our users have high expectations of our data center infrastructure - they want faster and more flexible provisioning as well as lower cost," said Philip Leung, Director of Information Technology Services, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. "It's very important to select a solution which can integrate all the main components including the network, the servers, the storage and the backup. Reliability, scalability, ease of automation and tight integration were the main criteria when we selected the Cisco data centre infrastructure platform."

AudienceView Ticketing, with 140 clients representing over 500 venues in Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Americas, is a provider for white-label, web-based ticketing solutions to theatres, arenas, stadiums, and arts organizations. It deployed a compact turnkey solution comprised of Cisco UCS, EMC storage and virtualization with VMware vSphere Hypervisor to support its cloud computing environment.

"Our main goal as an organization is growth, and now we have a standard building block for provisioning our data centers as we grow," said Gopi Balasingam, Vice President of Operations, AudienceView Ticketing. "UCS accelerates our time-to-market significantly - we used to spend up to a day and a half provisioning a new server, but now we can do it in 60 minutes - that business agility will translate into huge savings as we open up new data centers in the Asia-Pacific region. We also reduced operating costs by 25 percent because UCS requires less peripheral hardware."

From Boston University Medical Center 's Department of Medicine, Dr. John Meyers, technology director said: "UCS provides a powerful and flexible solution for our research environment - instead of dedicating each server to a specific application, we can use UCS service profiles to change the blades to support a new application in minutes. We've also used UCS to provision highly secure file transfer protocol (FTP) to share enormous quantities of data with other research institutions to facilitate collaboration on medical research."

ISV Partner Ecosystem for UCS
Independent software vendors are developing to the open UCS API, with over 10,000 applications supported today. UCS is an platform for agile, on-demand delivery of IT resources: the UCS API enables cloud management software to reconfigure computing, network, and storage access functions as business needs change.

UCS Supports Green Data Centers
IT managers can achieve more energy efficient data centers with the UCS - it uses one-half the components, and requires less cabling and power/cooling than legacy servers. Over 30 billion kilowatt hours of energy per year could be saved by replacing aging traditional servers and support infrastructure through unified computing and virtualization in the data center. This equals the energy output of 15 U.S. coal-fired electric plants and 35 million tons of CO².

Cisco's data center architecture is comprised of Unified Computing, Unified Fabric, and Unified Management. This integrated architecture, the Cisco Unified Data Center, provides faster provisioning of new services, reduces TCO and transforms how IT supports business goals, creating a foundation for next generation data centers whether they are bare-metal, highly virtualized or cloud computing environments.