With more apps moving to the cloud, Cisco Systems Inc.s Raghunath Nambiar, Distinguished Engineer with the companys Data Center Business Group, thinks that Oracle Corp.s commitment to cloud makes sense. So while Oraclehas been touting it benchmark leadership, Cisco has been a key part of Oracles move towards the cloud, and its Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) also compares well when benchmarked. Nambiar stopped by theCUBE at Oracles Open World conference to talk with Jeff Frick and John Furrier about UCS benchmarks and his predictions for the future of the data center.

People care about benchmarks, said Nambiar, because they enable comparison based on performance, price, and efficiency in a vendor-neutral way. The numbers are important for customers, vendors, and the organization itself. In terms of setting benchmarks, Nambiar said, Cisco has been doing extremely well. In fact, in the past five years, the company has achieved more than 95 industry benchmark reports.

Many members of the benchmarking community, Nambiar said, are employed by major vendors. Its their task, he explained, to remain neutral so consumers can accurately assess their options. When companies compare against each other, it creates an exciting, competitive environment, Nambiar said, and one from which customers benefit because prices go down while performance goes up.

Nambiar went on to discuss Ciscos relationship with Oracle, touching on Cisco customer use cases for Oracle and detailing that the modern enterprise applications fit into three buckets. These include:

1. Traditional, like transaction processing and enterprise data warehousing, for which Nambiar says Ciscos UCS is a great fit.

2. Emerging, like big data management, in which tools like Hadoop play an important role. Nambiar says that UCS is a good fit for this type of application, and is especially ideal if customers want to combine traditional and emerging applications.

View original post here:

Enlightenment through benchmarking, the Cisco way|#oow14