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.