The Unified Data Center: What’s in It for You?

Imagine for a moment that your first car was the only one you were ever allowed to buy. For most of us that was a rusty bucket of bolts that met our basic needs: getting us to point B with a minimal number of breakdowns. But if you kept it indefinitely, and you wanted to keep up with the speed of traffic, you would need to upgrade it one piece at a time—swapping out each antiquated part for a new one along the way. You would start to get stuck with parts that weren’t made specifically for your model and eventually have to figure out how to graft on a whole new system that hadn’t even been imagined when your car was built.

Sounds crazy, right? Have you looked at your data center recently?

Think about all the upgrades, workarounds, homemade patches, and entirely new systems you’ve grafted on to it. If it were a car, it would look like some steampunk cruiser out of a Mad Max movie.

Businesses can’t afford to stay glued to an inflexible IT infrastructure. They just won’t be able keep up with the new application and service demands of a workforce operating around the world. Its limitations make it responsible for slow rollout of critical applications and services, inadequate resources, poor operation visibility and control, and unpredictable system integration. And that’s where Cisco comes in.

Cisco’s Unified Data Center (UDC) platform is designed to overcome current data center constraints and provide agile, simplified, efficient IT service delivery and cloud computing. Its innovative platform facilitates virtualization, simplification, automation, and accelerated delivery of cloud applications and services providing a sustainable business advantage. Just as importantly, UDC is built so it can be customized to your needs. It has an open, standards-based data center network architecture and ecosystem that maintains customer choice and increases business value while substantially decreasing the total cost of ownership.

UDC combines three integrated, leading data center technologies: Cisco Unified Fabric, Unified Computing, and Unified Management. The result: A radically simplified architecture. This simplicity lays the foundation for significant cost savings and agility.

The Unified Data Center saves you money by:

• Increasing computing power per rack unit
• Avoiding unnecessary CapEx investment for servers required solely to support memory-intensive applications
• Avoiding unnecessary investment to increase network and I/O bandwidth
• Reducing management complexity
• Improving network efficiency to ensure QoS despite centralization of servers

How much money does it save? Well, Forrester Consulting conducted a study and on average, the “composite organization” realized a three-year risk-adjusted ROI of 177% with Cisco Unified Computing Services. If those savings sound good to you, let our experts help you.