So, now that we’ve discussed who the major players are, let’s take a closer look at why it’s really such a big deal that we can now deploy our Unified Communications products as part of our virtual infrastructure, using the Cisco UCS.

Anyone who’s managed switches over the years knows that the Spanning-tree protocol (STP) is both the best and worst thing to ever happen to the data center at layer 2 of the OSI model.

On the plus side, the Spanning-tree protocol is what first allowed us to create redundant paths within our switching infrastructure, making our data center much more resilient to outages than ever before. Anyone who’s experienced a “broadcast storm” knows the full value of Spanning-tree in the traditional switching environment. We’ve also seen many improvements in Spanning-tree over the years to make it work faster and more efficiently (i.e. Rapid Spanning-tree, Bridge Assurance, and many others).

While the Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) is at the heart of Cisco’s UC design, there are many additional components that greatly increase the organization’s capabilities to stay connected.

For example, a few of these additional server-based resources include:

The Cisco UCS is truly a “unified” architecture that integrates three major datacenter technologies into a single, coherent system:

Computing
Network
Storage

Instead of being simply the next generation of blade servers, the Cisco UCS is an innova­tive architecture designed from scratch to be highly scalable, efficient, and powerful with one-third less infrastructure than traditional blade servers.

So, now that we’ve discussed who the major players are, let’s take a closer look at why it’s really such a big deal that we can now deploy our Unified Communications products as part of our virtual infrastructure, using the Cisco UCS.

Modern business communication capabilities have evolved tremendously from the days of analog and digital telephony. Back then, we relied on Private Branch Exchanges (PBXs) located physically at each site to control the analog and digital signaling for local phones and other devices, such as fax machines and overhead paging solutions. Likewise, the PBX also defined and controlled the signaling of external trunks to the telephony carrier’s central office (CO).

The Cisco UCS is truly a “unified” architecture that integrates three major datacenter tech­nologies into a single, coherent system:

Computing
Network
Storage

Instead of being simply the next generation of blade servers, the Cisco UCS is an innova­tive architecture designed from scratch to be highly scalable, efficient, and powerful with one-third less infrastructure than traditional blade servers. The net effect of this is dramat­ically reduced power and cooling costs and easier, centralized management.

Since forming in 1998, VMware has been the industry leader in virtualization and the primary innovator of technologies that made it possible to even consider “cloud computing”. Therefore, you can be assured that a VMware certification will not only carry a lot of weight, but it’ll also be relevant and applicable for a long, long time.