This weekend I managed to see the new James Bond film, Skyfall.  The technologist in me noticed the transformation of the espionage industry to the cyber world.  More interesting were the Data Center scenes in which the equipment was neatly arranged with minimal cabling.  One blog even called it the data center of the future.

(This film image released by Sony Pictures shows Daniel Craig, left, and Javier Bardem in a scene from the film "Skyfall." Bardem portrays, Raoul Silva, one of the finest arch-enemies in the 50-year history of Bond films.) (AP Photo/Sony Pictures, Francois Duhamel) -Notice the data center equipment in the background.

Reality is that data centers are full of cables (see above) unless you are using Cisco UCS in which case you have a chance of being in the future NOW.  General availability of UCS Manager 2.1, which brings all the cable reduction benefits to rack mount servers could not have been more timely.

In his blog earlier this month, Colin Lynch highlighted some of the benefits of the new software Release 2.1 which also supports and integrates with Cisco UCS Central. Tune in to the Nov 8 webcast to find out more about UCS Central.  In this webcast you will also see a customer case study of Valve Corporation the creator of the popular game Half-Life.  The webcast specifically shows the cable reduction and even shows a 3-year total cost of ownership comparison to traditional servers from a competitor. The comparison shown below is based on the use of rack mount servers and shows significant savings on networking equipment if external storage is deployed with the Cisco UCS.   Big savings also accrue with ongoing maintenance of the rack server infrastructure if local storage disks are used.  These calculations were made using the Cisco UCS TCO/ROI Advisor.  In his blog last month, Bill Shields has identified customer case studies on cable reduction with Cisco UCS.