As an early convert to the virtues of Cloud computing, it is fascinating to see the adoption of the ideas.  Most organizations if not all, are figuring out how to harness cloud technologies to their advantage.   It is interesting to get a perspective from an analyst who talks to users on a regular basis or better still find out what similar organizations are doing.   In a few recent conversation with Mike Spanbauer, Industry analyst at Current Analysis, Cisco Executives, Jim McHugh and Brian Schwarz discussed several topics. One of topics was "Private Cloud", highlighting the opportunities and challenges that adopters face.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN0_Mc68YlQ

When harnessed cloud technologies should therefore help users reign in IT costs and chaos while helping IT better align with existing business needs.  It should also help IT scale up and down services with changing business needs.  Common use cases for deploying cloud technologies are elasticity, flexibility, normalization and simpler management to address a heterogeneous infrastructure for varied workload demands.  Cloud infrastructure addresses the short-term bursty nature of application development and test very well.

Cisco UCS is an innovative server platform uniquely positioned to help adopters succeed with cloud technologies. The converged server and network infrastructure is a necessity when everything is connected to the cloud. The need for scaling up and down rapidly is enabled by the programmability of the system.  Software configuration of the server with its LAN and SAN connections helps in the reliability and time to value of the server infrastructure.  This is possible with the service profiles supported by the Cisco UCS Manager. Service profiles also help normalize and abstract the physical infrastructure to meet the needs of varying workloads.  The recent release of Cisco UCS Central and the API makes large scale globally distributed infrastructure deployment possible. With virtual machines enjoying direct access to the network with the Cisco VM-FEX technology users can take advantage of server virtualization and get optimal network performance.

And of course, it is very important to see how industry peers are using the Cisco UCS to solve the very challenges Cloud adopters face. Tune in to a webcast on December 6 at 9:00 am PST  to hear from Cisco UCS customers Xerox and FICO Corporation, about how and why they used it in their Cloud environments.