The Vblock Solution For Cisco Unified Communications

To succeed in today’s fast paced, global economy, businesses must be able to communicate and collaborate. This requires access to a range of voice, video, and messaging communication tools. While the essence of communication is to break down barriers, organizations today must contend with the barriers imposed by increasingly complex communications environments.

The VCE solution enables rapid deployment of Cisco® Unified Communications applications on Vblock™ Infrastructure Platforms to provide an integrated hardware and software solution that connects people, information, and teams, helping to enable comprehensive and effective collaborative experiences.

Watch the video “Cisco UC ‘As-A-Service’ Offers on Vblock Platform” which provides an overview of the solution, and what customers can expect and then read more to get the details on the solution.




Read more to get the details on the solution.

Vblock for Cisco UC Solution Highlights
• Integrated hardware and software solution speeds time to revenue
• Easily scale infrastructure up and out to meet demand and accommodate growth in services
• Option to use blade packs pre-configured for Cisco Unified Communications
• Efficient, simplified management of compute, network, and storage as a single entity
• Integrated compute, network, storage, virtualization, and management technology improves application performance, security, dynamic scaling, and disaster recovery
• Converged infrastructure reduces cost power, and footprint
• Pervasive virtualization provides application mobility and agility making it easy to relocate and add resources as needed

The Business Case for UC on Vblock
Employees, partners, and customers communicate with each other using many communications methods including mobile phones, tablets, PCs, personal digital assistants (PDAs), video conferencing, voice mail, instant messaging, and email. Although these tools can make communications easier, faster, and more flexible, a lack of integration between devices and media types can slow down business communications, and hinder productivity.

Organizations are equally concerned with increasing the operational efficiency and reducing the CAPEX and OPEX associated with the IT resources in their data centers. Businesses need to simplify the data center architecture and IT operations so they can focus on business innovation instead of integrating, validating, and managing IT infrastructure.

The Vblock UC Solution
The Vblock Solution for Unified Communications brings together Cisco Unified Communications, a comprehensive, integrated IP communications system of voice, messaging, video, and desktop applications, on the pre-engineered, pre-integrated, validated Vblock platform. The solution eliminates the need to build an infrastructure from individual vendor products—–a non-trivial undertaking where architecture design, deployment, and operational complexities are can be a hindrance.

The Vblock platform provides the ability to seamlessly scale the Unified Communications system up and out as needed using standard compute, network, and storage building blocks. Unified Communications, deployed on the Vblock platform, enables companies to adapt quickly to market changes, increase productivity, improve their competitive advantage, and deliver a rich media experience across any workspace. To facilitate rapid and simplified deployments, blade packs that are preconfigured for Unified Communications applications will be offered as a Vblock platform option.

The Solution Key Benefits
Key benefits of deploying the Vblock solution for Unified Communications are:
Factory integrated components and validated solutions speed time to value - On-site installation, configuration, and performance tuning of the Vblock platform to ensure successful and rapid deployment - Standardized infrastructure for application mobility, IT simplicity, and lower CAPEX and OPEX.

The Key Differentiators
One of the traditional challenges with Unified Communications has been the sizing and scaling of the storage system. Customized sizing guidelines for the Vblock platform specific to Cisco Unified Communications makes storage configuration simple and straightforward. To simplify deployment and configuration, blade packs, pre-configured to adhere to Cisco Unified Communications configuration standards, are available.

Vblock Infrastructure Platforms
With Vblock Infrastructure Platforms, VCE delivers the industry’s first completely integrated IT offering that combines best of breed virtualization, networking, computing, storage, security, and management technologies with end-to-end vendor accountability. This converged infrastructure enables rapid virtualization deployment, so customers quickly see a return on investment (ROI). Vblock Infrastructure Platforms offer varying storage capacities, processing and network performance, and they support such incremental capabilities as enhanced security and business continuity.

The Next Steps
To learn more read The Vblock Solution for Unified Communications or visit www.vce.com.

Backstory: Upon joining VCE I took on this project and worked with the producer to complete this video and publish the linked paper and write this blog. This was also published on the Cisco Channels blog site.