Speed is one thing that Cisco UCS and the NHL's Minnesota Wild franchise share in common. If you have ever been to a professional hockey game you recognized and probably came to appreciate the speed, skill, and nimbleness of the players out on the ice. For Cisco UCS, speed is an attribute inherent in what we do, too -our compute business is highly competitive and requires constant, skillful, and quick innovation to deliver the best and newest in technology to our customers.

The NHL's Minnesota Wild franchise rely on a Cisco UCS based I.T. infrastructure for their Microsoft Dynamics and CRM software portfolio. To better serve and interact with clients the Wild I.T. staff established three goals for their recent IT infrastructure transformation project:

• Simplify infrastructure to boost staff productivity,
• Improve resource management for controlled growth
• Promote sustainability to conserve resources and provide environmentally conscious facilities for clients.

Looking at their long-term goals for cloud computing, the Wild staff decided to invest in a solution based on our Unified Computing System? (UCS?) servers with Tegile based hybrid storage solutions. In doing so, the Wild established for them a highly agile data center environment that supports their current and future cloud initiatives with a virtual desktop infrastructure solution. The end results of the I.T. transformation project for the Wild were impressive as they:

• Achieved 43 percent reduction in support costs
• Reduced power by 63 percent and heat output by 68 percent
• Reduced data from 42TB to 17TB

Once again we see the UCS architecture delivering improved performance at lower operating costs for a Microsoft oriented environment -Dynamics and CRM. In the case of the Minnesota Wild, a small I.T. organization when compared with larger enterprise I.T. organizations, they were able to deliver significant business value to their organization and position themselves for future technology shifts. Read more about the Minnesota Wild and their Cisco UCS experience here.

Learn more about Cisco's Unified Data Center Microsoft solution capabilities at www.cisco.com/go/microsoft.