Since Cisco UCS Mini launched last September, Cisco and our partners (Citrix, EMC, Microsoft, NetApp, Nimble Storage, Oracle, SAP, and VMware) have been hard at work putting together a wide variety of solutions.

On the way to tradeshow week (May 4^th), I'll be doing a brief blog series on UCS Mini tied to these shows.

First up, Microsoft Ignite in Chicago. This will be my fourth year talking with our customers and potential customers at Microsoft events and I'm really looking forward to it!

As a good starting point, read Optimize Microsoft Environments with Cisco UCS Mini. It is a great overview of our compute, management, and networking integrations with Microsoft.

While any UCS Mini blade solution can be used with Microsoft operating systems and applications, sometimes local storage just isn't enough. We have three specific solutions offering expanded storage.

• Cisco UCS Mini for Nimble Storage SmartStack with Microsoft Applications
• EMC VSPEX and Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V
• Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 with Microsoft Storage Spaces

A FlexPod (with NetApp storage) is also a great choice for Microsoft Windows Server. Check out the FlexPod with Cisco UCS Mini Design Guide.

If you can't wait to learn about all of our solutions, I've summarized them in the Cisco UCS Mini: Powering Applications At-a-Glance.

Are you going to Microsoft Ignite in May? Stop by Cisco's booth (#122) to talk with our experts on why Cisco UCS servers are the ideal platform for your Microsoft applications. Hope to see you there.

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Great things come in small packages.#CiscoUCS Mini is small, but mighty. http://bit.ly/1C8Bs7n

A post shared by Cisco Data Center (@ciscodc) on Apr 1, 2015 at 10:06am PDT