Is your organization thinking about virtualization, perhaps on the Cisco C or B Series Unified Computing System? The decision to consolidate and virtualize and environment should not be taken lightly, there are multiple factors that need to be addressed. However, the benefits far exceed the capital expenditures.

Virtualization on the UCS allows you to treat IT as a service, if a department wants a new “sandbox”, imagine being able to provide a web page for users to provision their own sandbox environment for application development and testing. Sound appealing? Also, imagine being able to patch and test updates to applications and operating systems without worry of failures, this is easily accomplished in a virtualized environment with VMware and Cisco UCS.

Today, more than 70 percent of IT budget is spent simply to maintain and manage existing infrastructure (Source: Forrester, December 2008).

The result: IT organizations must continually increase resources to maintain a growing, complex, and inflexible infrastructure versus using them to rapidly and effectively respond to business needs.

IT organizations are working with their business counterparts to identify ways to substantially decrease cost of ownership while increasing IT business value.  Imagine the cost involved with running racks of equipment in a data center per day, per month, or even per year!  The cooling, power conditioning, and security alone is often costly.

The Cisco Unified Computing System helps address these challenges by streamlining data center resources, scaling service delivery, and radically reducing the number of devices requiring setup, management, power/cooling, and cabling.

The Cisco Unified Computing System can deliver these benefits through:

• Reducing total cost of ownership at the platform, site, and organizational levels
• Increasing IT staff productivity and business agility through just-in-time provisioning and mobility support for both virtualized and non-virtualized environments
• Enabling scalability through a design for up to 320 discrete servers and thousands of virtual machines in a single highly available management domain
• Using industry standards supported by a partner ecosystem of innovative, trusted industry leaders

The Cisco Unified Computing System represents a radical simplification of traditional architectures, dramatically reducing the number of devices that must be purchased, cabled, configured, powered, cooled, and secured. The solution delivers end-to-end optimization for virtualized environments while retaining the ability to support traditional OS and application stacks in physical environments.

The solution delivers end-to-end optimization for virtualized environments.

The system helps to reduce total cost of ownership by automating element-management tasks through the use of service profiles that enable just-in-time provisioning. Service profiles increase business agility by quickly aligning computing resources with rapidly changing business and workload requirements.

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