Cisco has capitalized on market trends and needs by designing the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) from the ground up, learning from mistakes made by early entrants into the blade market. This entrance enabled Cisco to design from a "clean slate" perspective. UCS delivers on the data center automation promise by implementing the cross-silo management, maximizing flexibility and business agility with true "stateless computing," as well as delivering on the virtualization capabilities required by modern data center initiatives.

This EMA white paper begins with a brief UCS overview and then dives into an in-depth TCO analysis, focusing on the primary areas where IT Directors can derive significant benefits: compute, network, storage, virtualization, and management. The paper takes a pragmatic approach to evaluating TCO, which is to say it is largely based on real customer experiences with UCS in the real world.