I've heard it said that CIO's like their ERP systems the same way they like their cars: big, fast and German. Setting nationalities aside, IT pros craving more horsepower for something like SAP HANA need look no further than our UCS B460 M4 and C460 M4 servers, which now supports Intel's new Xeon E7v3 processor family.

You may wonder why news like this is this important in an age where hardware is so often taken for granted. The answer is speed, in two flavors:

• Faster Applications
• Fast IT

Organizations across the spectrum are working to become intelligence-driven throughout their operations, in real time, in order to create a perpetual and renewable competitive edge. Taking a long-term view in choosing the right infrastructure accomplish this important. Here are two reasons why:

1. You never hear about an analytic environment getting smaller. Massive increases in data volume mean these environments inevitably grow.   For many, this will mean continuously expanding clusters of hundreds or thousands of servers for scale-out big data apps and bringing in ever-larger systems for the scale-up, in-memory analytics.
2. Data is the lifeblood of the digital enterprise. As the use of big data becomes pervasive and critical to day-to-day decision-making, the performance and predictability of these computing platforms will become increasingly paramount to success. So too will be the speed at which they can be deployed and expanded. You want to choose partners and technology you can trust.

IT departments need computing infrastructure designed for efficient operation at scale. At the same time, they will always need more horsepower at the single system level, and that horsepower can't come with additional power and cooling load. Cisco UCS and Intel's new Xeon E7v3 lineup deliver on both of these vectors:

1. Cisco UCS C460 M4

   Traditional servers, essentially designed as stand-alone devices, aren't built with operational challenges of a continuously expanding environment in mind.   With Cisco UCS and Integrated Infrastructure for Big Data, we're bringing customers a platform optimized for long-term success because of its unified design, inherent scalability, and its robust security. By abstracting the identity and configuration of individual servers and automating management through policy, UCS allows IT teams to manage up to 10,000 servers as a single pool of resources. Many server vendors in the industry are still focused optimization of box-level density and power, which are really just computing table stakes. UCS is designed to optimize the most important resource in the data center: people's time.  This is Fast IT.

2. The systems we're releasing today can scale to (a mind-boggling) 72 processor cores and6TB of memory, ideal for the latest in-memory workloads as well as traditional ERP applications, databases and heavy virtualization.  Tied together across the high performance, low-latency unified fabric of UCS, this means Faster Applications.

Analytics will continue to accelerate disruption and opportunity across industries and the public sector. Cisco and Intel innovations deliver the analytic infrastructure customers need for the long haul, with UCS representing the most operationally effective platform to harness the incredible levels of performance and efficiency that Xeon delivers.

For more on this story, have a listen to today's Chip Chat, where Jim McHugh gives a view into what customers are doing in the realm of analytics.  And to stay up to date via twitter, please follow us at#CiscoUCS and#XeonE7.