My goodness... Were we ever busy in 2015! Our Cisco Big Data & Analytics teams executed and delivered a tremendous body of work with several key accomplishments these past 12 months. All of our activities -across all of our teams -was focused on delivering to you leading innovation, with industry leading performance & scalability, and offering flexibility via a variety of Big Data choices. Of course all of it based on Cisco UCS, Nexus, and ACI. Let's take a look at some of the highlights:

Platform

We introduced throughout 2015 various versions of our 3rd generation Big Data architecture. The solution,Cisco's UCS Integrated Infrastructure for Big Data, integrates our industry-leading computing, network, and management capabilities into a unified fabric-based architecture. Packaged as a Cisco Validated Designs (CVD) our architecture supports the leading Hadoop distributions: Cloudera, Hortonworks, IBM, and MapR. Our Big Data CVDs provide you peace of mind as they are tested, validated,andsupported. Take a peak at our Big Data CVDs here and see how they can expedite your Hadoop projects and drive operational efficiency.

Performance

We started the year announcing the industry's first ever standard based benchmark result for Big Data. Read Raghu Nambiar's January 2015 blog post were he describes Cisco publishing not one but three results at 1TB, 3TB and 10TB Scale Factors.

We ended the year with more benchmark performance news. In November, Girish Kulkarni announced our newest TPC record where Cisco UCS delivered the first-ever 100-terabyte and best 3-TB and 30-TB Big Data benchmark results on the TPCx-HS benchmark.

Partnerships

In the world of Big Data our ecosystem of partners is quite large. We partner with leading strategic Big Data and Analytic firms so we can bring you open choices for your Big Data projects -all are based on our Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure for Big Data offering.

Two key partnerships new in 2015 were with IBM and Splunk. Our IBM efforts brought together Cisco UCS and IBM's BigInsights technology. This September announcement delivered support for IBM BigInsights for Apache Hadoop on our Cisco UCS Integrated infrastructure for Big Data . The joint solution encompassed disruptive innovations in Cisco UCS and the robust and industry-compatible Apache Hadoop distribution from IBM.

Again in September we announced another new offering. This time it was with Splunk. Cisco and Splunk jointly introduced new reference architectures with Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure for Big Data, that delivered exceptional performance and massive scalability.

We did a ton of work with many of partners in 2015. Here we have just highlighted two. Please view the video below to learn about some of the other activities with our Partners:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHLEzhT93FI

We have had the pleasure of meeting many of you throughout the year at many events such as: Cisco Live!, various Strata-Hadoop shows, or regional partner seminars around the world.  We sincerely thank you for taking time out of your busy work life to meet with us. We very much appreciate it. In 2016 we look forward to continuing our discussions with you and continuing to bring you new innovations for Big Data.

To learn more on Cisco's Big Data & Analytics Datacenter solutions please visit www.cisco.com/go/bigdata