Are you preparing your organization for the end of support on Microsoft SQL Server 2005? Continuing to run legacy SQL Server can present significant challenges for your organization.

Information volume continues to grow worldwide at a minimum rate of 59% annually. And while data is expected to grow 44x larger over the next decade, the number of IT pros is only expected to grow 1.4x larger. This puts IT pros under pressure to perform at higher levels than they ever have, and legacy infrastructure is ill-equipped to take on this burden.

As SQL Server 2005 becomes end-of-support, not exposing organizations' databases to a tremendous amount of security risk should be a priority for your business. As the scale of data growth intensifies, the gapbetween the performance organizations' require and the capabilities of legacy database systems will continue to widen.

But with this challenge comes the opportunity to leverage powerful new capabilities that aren't available in older versions of SQL Server. It's time to think about upgrading to something better and faster soon.

IDC recently completed a study interviewing Cisco UCS installed customers and determined that by installing your application on a Cisco UCS server platform, customers will gain the following business benefits.

Maximize the return on investment of your mission critical applications by upgrading to Microsoft SQL Server 2014 on Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS). The Cisco UCS platform provides an average 5 year ROI of 368% and gives your organization increased SQL Server uptime, and performance while lowering upgrade costs.

Cisco UCS provides your organization with increased SQL Server uptime, and performance while lowering staff time needed for server deployment by 84%. In conjunction with Cisco Application-Centric Infrastructure (ACI), automate your IT tasks and accelerate application deployments, enabling your organization to be flexible, efficient, and agile.

Join Cisco at these upcoming events to get first hand knowledge of these benefits.

SQL Saturdays are 1 day training events for SQL Server professionals that focus on local speakers, providing a variety of high quality technical sessions. It's a group of SQL Server database administrators, database and application developers, business intelligence experts, and users from around the globe. This community is represented by more than 285 local PASS Chapters worldwide, 28 virtual chapters, 120,000 members.

Come visit Cisco at the upcoming locations:

Austin, TX - January 30th, 2016

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Chicago, IL -March 5th, 2016

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Boston, MA -March 19th

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Silicon Valley, CA - April 9th, 2016

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For more information on joint Cisco and Microsoft solutions, please visit our website at: cisco.com/go/microsoft