I recently attended Cisco DCUCI v5.0 – Data Center Unified Computing Implementation at Global Knowledge in Santa Clara. This is one of the Cisco classes for using their Unified Computing System, which are basically a blade chassis system for servers.
Implementing Cisco Data Center Unified Computing (DCUCI) is designed to serve the needs of engineers who implement Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) B-Series Blade Servers and Cisco UCS C-Series Rack-Mount Servers.
The class exactly follows and uses the Cisco course outline and curriculum, so it directly prepares you for the DCUCI certification examination. Global Knowledge has a data center with UCS in it, and the UCS is configured into student pods, so you actually get to RDP in and do actual management tasks on live UCS equipment. I found the hands on portion to be my most favorite.
This implementation class is designed to help you plan for and install UCS. It’s probably more directly beneficial for partners that are installing UCS regularly. For me as a customer, I will only install UCS a few times, very infrequently, so I probably will forget a lot of what I learned, since I won’t do it very often.
One thing I saw, and that differentiates UCS from other blade systems, is how well it scales.
Most blade systems have a set of management ports, address, web pages PER CHASSIS. So as you add multiple chassis, management of them grows to be unmanageable. With UCS, you use the same small set of management ports to manage all of your enclosures. That’s seriously cool.
I recommend DCUCI, but like I said, it’s best for people that will do UCS installs regularly. End customers like myself may do better to go to the troubleshooting class, DCUCT.
