Two years ago, Cisco delivered on an innovative vision to unite compute, network, storage access and virtualization into one cohesive system: the Unified Computing System (UCS.) Cisco recently reported its fourth quarter results for Fiscal Year 2011, and we are delighted by the growing market traction for this revolutionary new computing platform.
We ended our fiscal year with a total of 7,400 customers, adding over 2000 new UCS customers in Q4 alone. Customers from across all industry segments: Enterprise, Commercial, Service Provider and Public Sector, have invested in UCS solutions across the globe.
Our goal was to design a new system from the ground up that would be flexible and scalable enough to handle any workload. We delivered on the objective to create the ideal, programmable, platform for virtualized and cloud environments, and to help solve many of the very real challenges our customers face.
Cisco’s rapid market growth underscores our leadership in the industry transition to fabric computing and converged infrastructure. But this is just the beginning: we are committed to evolving UCS and delivering continued technology innovation. Thanks for joining us on this journey – we have leagues more innovation ahead of us.
At CiscoLive July 10-14 2011 in Las Vegas, we celebrated the 2nd year anniversary since we first began shipping UCS on July 20, 2009. It was the perfect time to look back on some key milestones to date.
- July 2009: Cisco begins shipping the UCS B-Series blade server
- October 2009: Cisco delivers to market the UCS patented Memory Extension Blade
- Nov. 2009: Cisco ships the UCS C-Series rack mount server
- December 2009: Cisco delivers the Virtual Interface Card for adapter consolidation and virtualization optimization; enables each virtualized adapter to define up to 128 Ethernet or Fibre Channel connections.
- April 2010: Cisco delivers next generation servers based on Intel Xeon processor 5600 series and Intel Xeon processor 7500 series; adds 4-socket servers to the UCS portfolio
- April 2011: Cisco now offers 9 systems in UCS portfolio; wins nine new industry benchmark world records
- May 2011: Cisco captures #3 spot in worldwide x86 blade server market, tied for #2 in North America and #2 in the US in the first quarter of CY2011, as measured by factory revenue *
- July 2011: At 7,400 strong and growing, UCS has a $1.1B annualized revenue run rate. More than 30% of UCS customers have placed repeat orders, with an average of 4 repeat buys each.
- August 2011: Cisco UCS achieved 45 Industry Benchmark World Records since 2009
- August 2011: Cisco continues growth in x86 blade servers: #3 worldwide, #3 in North America and #2 in the US for the second quarter of CY2011, as measured by factory revenue **
* IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker Q1CY11, May 2011
** IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker Q2CY11, August 2011
From customer results to product awards it’s clear why UCS is succeeding in the market:
Travelport: provides technical operations support and content-processing services for 420 airlines, 60,000 travel agencies, and online travel services. Travelport has deployed over 1200 Cisco Unified Computing System blade Servers and has seen eight times savings on racking, cabling, server, network, and costs, 86 percent savings in total support hours, 70 percent savings in total power (kW) and cooling costs and 86.5 percent savings in total data center floor space. Service profiles have also greatly enhanced IT’s ability to deploy applications quickly. The Travelport team can automatically generate a blade identity before new blades even arrive. Once the blade is installed, the identity is automatically populated, and the server is in production. Learn more
Berlin University of Technology: used UCS to create a virtualized cloud environment. “Although from the outside, UCS looks like a normal blade server system, it is in fact a highly scalable complete system for standardized virtualization of server, storage, and network resources, including common management.” With working memory that can be scaled up to 384 gigabytes, “that is ideal for virtualization.” Learn more
Walz Group: Walz customers include some of the largest financial institutions, government agencies, law firms, healthcare providers, insurance firms, and auto finance companies in the United States. Walz technology generates and manages millions of compliance-oriented critical documents each month. “We could not have achieved this level of cloud computing flexibility and security with any other platform.” With Cisco UCS Manager, configuring a new server blade to support a web portal or application takes approximately 15 minutes, compared to four hours with the old architecture. Learn more
Hannover Life Re America: a subsidiary of Hannover Re, the third largest reinsurer in the world, deployed UCS to reduce capital and power costs, while also reducing server provisioning time from days to minutes. The integrated design of UCS has allowed storage and server teams to cross-train, so that everyone can perform both server and storage tasks to increase the team’s flexibility. Learn more
ConnectEDU: provides education and career management solutions to learners of all ages across 2500 high schools and 450 colleges. Leveraging UCS they were able to reduce monthly data center costs by 35 percent, accelerate their application performance by a factor of five and cut time spent provisioning new applications from seven weeks to just a few hours. Learn more
InfoWorld Test Center Review: “Cisco UCS wows”
“Revolutionary. Cutting edge. State of the art. The truth is that truly revolutionary products are few and far between…That said, Cisco’s Unified Computing System fits the bill.”
eWEEK Labs Names the 2009 Enterprise IT Products of the Year
“From the creation and management of resource pools to the centralized control of change management throughout its high-performance hardware and software components, Cisco UCS exudes excellence based on Cisco’s vast experience in the data center.”
InfoWorld’s 2010 Technology of the Year Awards
“Cisco UCS is an extremely good idea, implemented extremely well, especially for a version 1.0 hardware platform. If Cisco can spread the good word about UCS next year, it should really take off. It’s a paradigm shift in datacenter infrastructure whose time has come.”
2010 VMWorld Award
Cisco Unified Computing System won in the “Hardware for Virtualization” category
UCS wins Microsoft Best of Tech•Ed 2011
Cisco UCS B250 M2 Extended Memory Blade Server was selected as Best of Show in the hardware category at Microsoft Tech Ed 2011
UCS wins 2011 Citrix Ready Business Solution of the Year
Cisco Desktop Virtualization Solution with Citrix XenDesktop: the most cost-effective and scalable platform for desktop virtualization. |