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.

Organizations are ready to promote greater value with virtualization, however, data center complexity and costs are skyrocketing. Virtual machines have emerged as the new “atomic unit,” moving fluidly throughout the data center, promising reduced costs and increased flexibility. Hindered by decreasing budgets and accidental architectures of the past, IT managers are struggling to realize the […]