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SF Bay Area UCS Users Group – April 25, 2013

As a new Cisco Unified Computing System user, I recently attended the quarterly SF Bay Area UCS Users Group on April 25, 2013 at Cisco in Santa Clara.  It was informative and I’m glad I went.  The public is invited to these, so if you have UCS or want to talk to someone who has UCS, you should register and come on down.

There were perhaps 30? people there on this day.  The event is hosted by Cisco, and facilitated by various Cisco employees, notably Bill Lulofs, who is one of the consulting design engineers for Unified Data Center in Northern California.  Cisco and Fusion IO provided lunch.

This group is just getting started, so right now there are a lot of presentations from vendors, and not so much group member interactions.  That is typical in my experience with new groups like this.  I imagine as we meet more, that we’ll mature into less vendor, more group interaction.

Agenda

 

First up at 1100 was Jacob Van Ewyk from Cisco (they had a last minute presenter change, so I can’t recall if the presenter was Jacob or an alternate…)  He covered new changes to the latest UCS and UCS Central.

I turned my flash off so as to not bother the presenter, and got some shake. Sorry for the bad picture.

Next was Jason Seifried from Datalink (a Cisco partner) who demonstrated Cloupia Unified Infrastructure Controller.  This appears on its face to be just another cloud management suite, but has extra no-so-obvious goodness in that it is built to command FlexPods.  With Cloupia CUIC you can not only see the status of all the components of the FlexPod (chassis, blades, switches, storage) you can command and configure them.  That is seriously cool!

After lunch, Bradley Dunn (they had a last minute presenter change, so I can’t recall if the presenter was Bradley or an alternate…) from Fusion IO went over Accelerating Applications with Fusion Powered Cisco UCS, specific devices for accelerating UCS for use with VDI, etc.  If you need more IOs from your storage system, then Fusion IO can help you avoid the forklift.

Last we had Jabari Norton from MapR talked about “Cisco UCS with MapR:  Delivering Advanced Performance for Hadoop Workloads“.  Solving Big Data problems with Hadoop is becoming common, but Hadoop is a Linux style roll-your-own solution that obeys Zawinski’s law – “Linux is only free if your time has no value.”  MapR has done all of the integration of Hadoop components and added some technology to make solving Big Data problems easier and even almost turnkey.

 

 

 

greg.porter

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