Meeting the needs of today’s business users is creating ever more complexity in the data center. It’s simply no longer efficient to manually assemble components at the cost of delayed service delivery. As IT leaders take a more holistic view of the data center they’ve started moving away from the notion of silos created by separate network, storage, server technology and administration stacks. At the speed of data, technology and business evolution, flexibility and an organization’s ability to adapt and respond are the true business advantages that IT must tap into.

A Cisco® Unified Computing System™ (UCS) eliminates much of the complexity that makes managing a traditional data center challenging by limiting the visibility needed to contain virtual server sprawl and to improve application performance. Simplified management is also addressed through a single system that spans server, storage and networking—as well as hardware—to create a truly integrated data center that facilitates the need for speed and transparent user experience.

Cisco UCS is designed to help IT teams overcome challenges, including:

• Time to deploy and provision servers. How does 74% faster sound?
• Time to deploy new applications. What if it took you only 2/3 of the time you spend now?
• Number of staff to manage infrastructure. Why shouldn’t 80% of that staff be focused on strategic initiatives?
• Reducing costs to scale. With up to a 52% cost reduction, your budget can stretch farther.
• Management complexity. Think about the difference made by a 99% reduction in management points.

Let’s face it; every data center faces the challenge of deploying more servers and applications to serve more users within the confines of existing space, power, and cooling resources. Running your data center the same way you’ve always done so isn’t the best choice when trying to transform the data center from a cost center to a business advantage.

One of the biggest sources of advantage for IT comes from the service profiles provided by Cisco UCS. Cisco service profiles configure complete systems, from firmware revisions and BIOS settings to network profiles, with click-of-the-mouse simplicity. Configuration complexity used to limit servers to a single function, but now they can serve one purpose by day and a different purpose by night; administrators simply assign service profiles and let the system’s automated configuration do the rest.

This single management point provides the capability for IT to respond to real-time, changing business needs due to the flexibility and agility to adapt quickly.

The question that must be answered is how much business advantage your data center will gain if it can use servers as dynamic resources that can be applied to meet any workload challenge at any time?

Download this white paper from Cisco to learn more.