I'm looking forward to EMC World 2016 at the Venetian in Las Vegas where thousands of attendees will meet and learn about the latest in compute, storage, networking, and solutions.  This year Cisco is a Diamond sponsor at EMC World 2016. The Cisco booth is number 412, right near the entrance to the exhibit hall. Please stop for a moment and participate in our interactive booth experience, joint theater presentations, chat with our experts and attend our speaking sessions.  In addition, Cisco will give away three different prizes including Apple TVs after each theatre preso, Cisco hats and Microsoft Surface Pro tablets at the end of day raffles.

At EMC World 2016 and Cisco booth 412 attendees also get to see how Cisco MDS 9000 Series Switches have met and often exceeded the demanding requirements for storage area networks for more than a decade. They offer a combination of performance, non-stop operations, and multi-protocol flexibility.  In addition, learn more how Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) reduces TCO, automates IT tasks, and accelerates data center application deployments. It accomplishes this using a business-relevant software defined networking (SDN) policy model across networks, servers, storage, security, and services.

Many of these theatre presentations will also revolve around Cisco UCS servers and Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure.  What are Cisco UCS servers?   It can really be summed up in a few words: software-abstracted hardware.  The "secret sauce" of UCS is really is software-compute hardware (servers) are abstracted in software objects, called service profiles that live in the network.   It sounds like a simple concept, but it affords both UCS Servers and UCS Integrated Infrastructure customers numerous, business-altering advantages.  These are real-world advantages that accrue to customers just like you.

Two of our earlier blogs take a look explaining what UCS Server are by metaphor and analogy:

• Bring the Industrial Revolution to your Oracle Workloads
• Simplify, Save, Increase Efficiency and Redefine the Word "Hardware"

UCS Integrated Infrastructure take UCS Servers and their benefits to the next level by with combining UCS Servers, Nexus switches and UCS Director with EMC storage to form a vBlock. One could think of an equation:

1. UCS Integrated Infrastructure plus EMC Storage  = Vblock

UCS Integrated Infrastructure can really be thought of as the "Intel Inside" of Vblocks.   Much of the IP of a Vblock is contained in these Cisco technologies that are branded UCS Integrated Infrastructure. Looking a little deeper inside a Vblock show that  UCS Integrated Infrastructure offers many advantages and benefits that aren't readily apparent from looking at the outside of a Vblock.  Next time you hear the word "Vblock", please also think of the benefits that the Vblock gains due to UCS Integrated Infrastructure.

Another interesting question is if UCS Integrated Infrastructure comprises such a large part of the Vblock value proposition: what kind of benefits does it in fact provide to a Vblock?   Luckily, we have such a proof point in a recent IDC study.    For example, this IDC study showed how 15 companies running Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure achieved 483% 5-year ROI, 7-month breakeven.

Click On IDC Paper Image to Get Paper

This same study went on to list benefits beyond these significant monetary benefits. Some of these benefits include:

1. 76% decrease in unplanned downtime per year
2. 56% decrease in a mean time to repair
3. Large increases in productive staff hours

These and other benefits are listed in the IDC paper.  However, what really matter is how UCS Integrated Infrastructure helps your company and employees.

1. Could your staff be working on other high-value projects due to the productivity benefits gained by UCS Integrated Infrastructure?
2. Could you have less infrastructure downtime?
3. Could your business automate processes and bring software benefits to compute hardware provisioning and deployment?
4. Could your business have lower environmental costs due to SingleConnect technology of UCS Integrated Infrastructure?

Could your IT shop be missing out on these benefits?  Please stop by booth number 412 and learn more about how UCS, Vblock / UCS Integrated Infrastructure can help your business and IT experts become more productive.  In fact, perhaps, with UCS Integrated Infrastructure, your infrastructure can truly serve your business, not the other way around.