Solution Brief
March 2015
Highlights
Build the Cloud You Need
• Cisco Unified Computing System™
(Cisco UCS®) is an integrated system that takes the guesswork out of deploying private and hybrid clouds.
Increase Agility and Efficiency
• Transform your data center infrastructure into pools of resources that can be easily allocated and repurposed.
Automate and Orchestrate at the
Right Level
• Use programmatic infrastructure at the level your organization needs, from scripts to fully automated capabilities, to deploy and maintain your physical, virtual, and cloud platforms with better visibility and control.
Protect Your Infrastructure,
Information, and Business
• Keep your workloads and data secure with consistent security policies and role-based management capabilities.
Scale to Meet Business, User, and
Workload Demands
• Scale your cloud infrastructure and workloads—up, out, or both—across private and public resources to deliver services in shorter time frames, support a growing user community, and increase workload mobility.
Every day, businesses perform a delicate balancing act: working to outperform competitors with IT resources that often are unresponsive and unmanageable.
Those limitations result in incremental improvements rather than real innovation.
That’s why many organizations use Cisco UCS to build the cloud solutions that can move their businesses forward. Whether you need a private or hybrid cloud,
Cisco UCS provides the best foundation for your deployment. You can tap into the resources you need while improving IT response times and business agility.
As you turn to cloud computing to enhance business agility, your infrastructure must be easy to integrate, automate, and orchestrate. Whether your company needs to offer self-service, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), or software-as-a-service (SaaS) capabilities, the flexibility of Cisco UCS can help you meet your IT and business goals (Figure 1).
Integration for Greater Flexibility
Many IT departments have large sets of hardware and software components— and spend a lot of time integrating them into a workable solution. Unlike other solutions that simply overlay software, Cisco UCS is an integrated system that takes the guesswork out of deploying cloud infrastructure. The system integrates industry-standard, x86-architecture Intel® Xeon® blade and rack servers with networking, storage, and intelligent management resources in a self-aware and selfintegrating system. This design delivers greater computing density, virtualization,
© 2015 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.

Cisco Unified Computing System:
The Best Platform for Your Cloud Deployments
Rick McIntosh
Manager of Systems Infrastructure
Children’s Hospital Colorado
Read the case study at http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/ solutions/collateral/data-center- virtualization/childrens_hospital.pdf
and network simplicity in a smaller, more cost-effective footprint that helps make your cloud infrastructure and business more agile.
All components are connected through a unified fabric that delivers high-performance data and storage networking to simplify deployment, help ensure the quality of the user experience, and reduce operating costs. Integrated network services provide high-speed connectivity and high availability, accelerate application performance, and reduce the security risks associated with multitenant environments.
Resource Pooling for Infrastructure
Agility and Efficiency
IT managers and cloud providers recognize that users expect continuous operation, so IT can’t take a long time to add new servers or repurpose idle ones. Cisco UCS lets you move from technology silos to a holistic approach that transforms your data center infrastructure into pools of resources that can be easily allocated and repurposed. Your applications can run more efficiently within, between, and beyond your data center boundaries—and your IT department can evolve to an IT-as-a-Service
(ITaaS) model to accelerate service delivery and increase revenue.
Unlike other solutions, Cisco UCS implements templates and pools at the physical layer. Servers can be classified into resource pools based on a variety of criteria, from physical attributes (such as processor, memory, or disk capacity) to chassis location.
Even universally unique identifiers
(UUIDs), MAC addresses, and worldwide names (WWNs) can be pooled and used as needed. These capabilities help automate provisioning by identifying servers that can be configured to assume a role, such as web, database, or virtual desktop infrastructure server. Your IT staff can set up the system to automatically assign resources to pools and provision them based on their pool assignment, whether you are deploying blade or rack servers, or both.
Because server configurations can be replicated easily, your staff can deploy and scale your cloud infrastructure and repurpose servers with ease.
As a result, your business gets the resources it needs when it needs it— and your IT staff doesn’t have to stay up all night to reconfigure solutions.
A Stateless Approach So IT and
Business Can Adapt
Organizations that move to the cloud recognize that flexibility matters—and that cloud infrastructure should let you easily allocate and use resources on a moment’s notice. That means that your cloud infrastructure shouldn’t be rigidly defined and configured.
Cisco UCS uses a stateless, programmable approach to give you exceptional flexibility for determining how, when, and where your resources are deployed and used.
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Cisco Unified Computing System:
The Best Platform for Your Cloud Deployments
Cisco UCS abstracts server identity, personality, and I/O connectivity from the hardware, enabling these characteristics to be applied on demand. These abstractions, called service profiles, allow every aspect of a server’s configuration—from firmware revisions and BIOS settings to network profiles—to be assigned through the system’s open, documented, standards-based XML API or the Cisco
UCS Manager GUI.
Service profiles allow you to treat your server resources as raw computing capacity that can be allocated and reallocated among application workloads. This approach supports a more dynamic and efficient use of server capacity regardless of whether server virtualization is being used.
Because this intelligent system knows how objects fit together and can apply service profiles in a consistent manner, you can have confidence that the right equipment is provisioned for the workload it is going to support.
Traditional management approaches make your IT environment difficult to use and scale. That’s because the approach of leaving management to an afterthought results in incomplete solutions that fail to deliver unified infrastructure management. Cisco breaks down these barriers so you can simplify, deploy, and maintain your physical, virtual, and cloud platforms with better visibility and control.
Better Management for Better
Business Advantage
Whatever management level you choose, your IT staff can easily virtualize, automate, and secure your
Cisco UCS deployments and achieve cloud scale for dynamic business applications. Your IT staff can tap into cloud resources so your data center can handle spikes in demand. This increased flexibility means that you can scale your infrastructure and workloads up or out, or both, across private and public resources to deliver new and innovative services in shorter time frames, support a growing user community, and increase workload mobility.
Policies
Embedded Model-Based Management
No matter which cloud orchestration and automation software you use, you need infrastructure that supports those activities. With Cisco UCS, you can use programmatic infrastructure at whatever level your organization needs, from scripts to fully automated capabilities.
Cisco UCS is programmed through a single, embedded, model-based management interface to accelerate the deployment and performance of physical, virtualized, and cloudcomputing environments. An extensive
XML API with a software development kit (SDK) that includes an emulator facilitates custom development to achieve new levels of system visibility and control. With the Cisco UCS XML
API, your IT department can easily
Open Programmatic Interfaces
Cisco UCS Management
Policies
Infrastructure Pools
Templates with
Consistent Scaling
Security, Redundancy, and
Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
Figure 1. Cisco UCS Integrates Everything You Need to Deploy Cloud Infrastructure
© 2015 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 3 of 6

Cisco Unified Computing System:
The Best Platform for Your Cloud Deployments tap into your private and hybrid cloud resources and manage your entire system with scripts you customize for your unique cloud deployment.
Integration with Cloud Management
Platforms
If you already use a cloud management platform, you can protect your software investments and take advantage of a cloud based on Cisco® technology.
With the Cisco UCS XML API, you can plug into cloud management platforms from a wide range of vendors, including Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud, Microsoft System Center, and VMware vRealize Automation. As a result, your administrators can use familiar management models and take advantage of built-in automation and intelligence to gain outstanding visibility into, and control over, your private, public, and hybrid cloud environments.
Full Automation and Orchestration
You can also fully automate your cloud environment with solutions like Cisco
UCS Director. This powerful software unifies and automates end-to-end infrastructure management processes by abstracting the complexity of individual devices, hypervisors, and virtual machines and by automating management processes through a unified and easy-to-use set of tools and interfaces.
Automation, orchestration, and lifecycle management capabilities simplify deployment and enable your IT staff to easily operationally integrate your bare-metal and cloud infrastructure resources to address complex, time-consuming, manual, and compartmentalized processes.
Because multivendor infrastructure is a deployment reality, a self-service web interface abstracts the complexity of devices, hypervisors, and virtual machines so you can stand up infrastructure within minutes and get the most from your cloud deployments.
This capability not only optimizes your resource use, it also improves business outcomes through increased agility, efficiency, and simplicity for both IT and your business (Figure 2).
Executives recognize the importance of security, particularly when infrastructure resources are shared. Cisco UCS can help you ensure compliance across your local or distributed data center.
Role- and Policy-Based Management
Typically, subject-matter experts
(SMEs) define the way that different classes of systems can be configured by creating resource pools and policies that cover their specific domains of expertise. For example, database administrators create policies that dictate the CPU, memory, and storage requirements for a given database application, and network administrators create policies that determine how that server should connect to the network. In many environments, these administrators do not collaborate on configuration tasks or necessarily understand how changes in their domain might affect other settings.
With Cisco UCS, your server, network, and storage administrators maintain responsibility and accountability for their domain policies within an integrated management environment. Each role
Third-Party and Custom Tools
Manage Integrated Infrastructure
Cisco UCS Director
Automate integrated infrastructure orchestration and management
Networking Computing
Operating
Systems and Virtual
Machines
Multivendor
Storage
Solutions
Manage Multiple Domains Worldwide
Cisco UCS Central Software
Manage multiple domains on the same campus or worldwide
Cisco UCS Manager
XML Application
Programming
Inteface
GUI
Command
Language
Interface
Figure 2. Cisco UCS Management Helps You Automate and Orchestrate at Many Levels
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Cisco Unified Computing System:
The Best Platform for Your Cloud Deployments has visibility into the actions taken by other roles, enhancing communication and simplifying coordination. Roles and privileges in the system can be easily modified and new roles quickly created.
Your administrators manipulate a model of a desired system configuration and associate a model’s service profile with hardware resources, and the system configures itself to match the model. This automation accelerates resource provisioning and workload migration with accurate and rapid scalability. In addition, your administrators can configure policies once, and then administrators at any level of competency can use these policies to configure a server that meets your corporate standards.
With the capability to limit what users and administrators can do, your IT department can help ensure consistent configurations as well as reduce the likelihood of security breaches and human errors that can cause downtime.
Cloud Security with Cisco Intercloud
Fabric
Many organizations consider hybrid cloud infrastructure to be versatile, giving IT staff the flexibility to access the right resources for each cloud workload and business challenge.
Shifting workloads throughout the fabric of connections in hybrid clouds means that your security perimeter is constantly expanding.
Cisco Intercloud Fabric lets you create a hybrid cloud to extend your data center and cloud capacity on demand. As a result, your users can easily access additional computing and storage capacity—and your IT staff can be confident that your workloads and data are just as secure in the cloud as they are in your on-premises data center.
The software enables the establishment of secure connectivity and coherent sharing of security policies between private and public cloud environments.
With this easy-to-manage, open, and flexible environment, you can consistently enforce your data center security, quality of service (QoS), and access control policies in both private and public clouds. As a result, you can safely extend your data center and cloud capacity and scale your applications to adapt to changing priorities and strategies.
The unified infrastructure and architecture-by-design approach of
Cisco UCS delivers the scalability, simplicity, and flexibility needed in cloud environments. The system’s unified fabric results in fewer network interface cards (NICs), host bus adapters (HBAs), cables, and upstream switch ports, and eliminates the need for a parallel
Fibre Channel end-to-end network.
Traditional chassis-resident switches are replaced by a low-cost, low-power, zero-management fabric extender that enables the entire system to scale across multiple chassis without any addition of management points. All hardware and software components are
Brian Talley
Manager of Systems and
Networking, Photobucket, Inc.
Read the case study at http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/ solutions/collateral/switches/catalyst-
6500-series-switches/photobucket_ external_casestudy.pdf
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Cisco Unified Computing System:
The Best Platform for Your Cloud Deployments managed through unified, embedded management to improve operation efficiency with transparent scaling.
Form-Factor Flexibility
Different workloads and environments require different server types and configurations. Cisco UCS supports a range of blade and rack servers within the same domain so you can put the right resources to work for a task.
• Blade servers: Cisco UCS B-Series
Blade Servers provide massive amounts of computing power in a compact form factor, helping to increase density in computingintensive and enterprise application environments. Available in full- and half-width form factors, Cisco
UCS blade servers offer dedicated storage and high-capacity memory configurations to support workloads ranging from web infrastructure to distributed databases and business intelligence applications.
• Rack servers: Capable of operating in standalone deployments or as part of Cisco UCS, Cisco UCS
C-Series Rack Servers offer expansion capabilities to help your organization address fluctuating workload challenges. With a wide range of I/O, memory, internal disk, and solid-state disk (SSD) options, you can balance processing power and other resources to meet the requirements of your cloud infrastructure workloads.
• Modular servers: Cisco UCS
M-Series Modular Servers provide a dense, modular, powerefficient platform for the highly parallelized workloads typically found in cloud, online gaming, multivariable computing, and high-performance computing
(HPC) environments. The unique design of these servers separates computing from infrastructure components so that resources that typically are underutilized and over-provisioned—such as harddisk drive, I/O, base board, and network controller resources—can be aggregated and shared across multiple computing nodes. With these innovative servers, you can distribute your application across multiple servers to take advantage of many processors and large memory configurations to support more users and perform at cloud scale.
Whether you need to increase the capacity and performance of your cloud infrastructure or reduce your data center costs, Cisco UCS gives you the flexibility to deploy highdensity configurations—up to 320 servers in a single domain—and mix and match them to your unique business and application demands.
Let Cisco UCS help you increase your competitive advantage with cloud infrastructure that delivers agility while reducing your total cost of ownership
(TCO). Whether you need to deploy a private cloud or extend your capabilities with a hybrid cloud approach, Cisco
UCS makes it easy to build cloud environments while retaining visibility and control over your IT infrastructure.
To learn more about Cisco UCS, visit http://www.cisco.com/go/ucs .
To learn more about Cisco UCS
Director, visit http://www.cisco.com/go/ ucsdirector .
To learn more about Cisco Application
Centric Infrastructure (ACI), visit http://www.cisco.com/go/aci .
To learn more about Cisco Validated
Designs, visit http://www.cisco.com/go/ designzone .
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