April 15, 2015
Cisco UCS Director, formerly known as “Cloupia”, has strived to constantly expand upon the value of modern data center infrastructure components ever since Cisco announced the product’s acquisition in late 2012. On average, 75% of an IT Systems Administrator’s day is spent on configuration changes and troubleshooting of unintegrated compute, network, and storage platforms. They do all this while also competing with Cloud to keep IT relevant. If 75% of a day is spent on maintenance, how can an organization focus on technology innovation to make a better business environment? This shift in technology requirements is gradually leaving only two options for the future of business infrastructure on the table, either MOVE TO THE CLOUD or COMPETE WITH IT.
The Evolution of UCS
UCS Director, in a nutshell, is the software that creates a private cloud. To be clear, a “TRUE” private cloud as I would define it, contains compute, network, and storage with a middleware for automation, multi-tenancy, orchestration, monitoring, and self-service workload provisioning. Traditionally, admins would pull together parts and pieces of the network, compute, and storage items and Frankenstein them together. This meant leaving the organization prone to risk during support, upgrades, and cumbersome individual device management. Reference architecture, such as Flexpod, is a great step up as a validated way to best connect datacenter components together, however, what many customers are asking for is the ability to view the entire data center infrastructure as a single product. This is where Converged Infrastructure came to play. Converged Infrastructure is basically an entire data center in a packaged product. It is managed, monitored, and supported as a single unit with the tradeoff of an all or nothing purchasing option for the benefits. But, the inability of converged infrastructure, such as VCE, to piece together various hypervisor, storage, compute, and network components with the same benefits left a gap in the marketplace. This gap was filled by UCS Director.
4 Benefits of UCS Director:
- Converged Infrastructure with the flexibility of various vendors for physical and virtual data center components.
- Private Cloud enablement on-premise with an OPEX cost model and sovereignty.
- ACI management for extending the benefits of UCS director beyond the infrastructure level and expanding to the personality of the application itself and it’s security and performance requirements
- Significantly greater alignment with business and technology
Cisco UCS Director with Mindsight
Mindsight is a leading partner with Cisco Data center Solutions. We can develop and design, implement, and support strategy for your specific use case to overcome existing challenges and increase business capabilities. If you would like a Solutions Architect to provide a free consultation on how Mindsight leverages UCS Director in the Data center, please contact us today.
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About Mindsight
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