Enterprise Partner Solutions

Solutions for Microsoft OEM Partners

Highlights

Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) introduces an innovative solution that brings exceptional value to our joint Microsoft and Cisco customers. Cisco and Microsoft have a long history of strong partnership, and Cisco’s UCS represents a world-class solution that Microsoft is committed to delivering through our strategic alliance.

UCS on the Microsoft platform features integrated System Center tools to help streamline and centralize management for physical and virtual environments, including deployment, network optimization, and application services. Microsoft Windows Server, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Microsoft System Center provide the foundation layer for Cisco’s UCS, and Microsoft SQL Server provides the data platform. Together, we are delivering what customers need today more than ever—lower costs, faster deployments, and increased flexibility, scalability, productivity, and performance.

Jointly, we are enabling next-generation data center solutions that can help customers achieve maximum value from their IT assets in a unified computing architecture.

One of the greatest benefits of Microsoft technologies is support from the Microsoft eco-system. Microsoft partners, such as Dell, HP, NEC, and Unisys, have developed solutions that work with the high-end editions of Windows Server.

Specifically, there are two programs with Microsoft OEM Partners that showcase the high-end editions of Windows Server 2008 R2:

Windows Server 2008 R2 High Availability Program
The program provides highly available solutions for business-critical workloads and large-scale virtualization by combining hardware that contains redundant components and the latest reliability, availability, serviceability (RAS) technologies, high-end editions of Windows Server, end-to-end testing including only signed drivers, proactive change management best practices, and reactive support from OEMs covering the hardware and operating system with escalations to dedicated Microsoft support engineers.
Failover Clustering Configuration Program
The Microsoft strategy is to work with partners to provide clustered solutions that are built with industry standard commodity–based components that deliver high availability for the complete range of businesses—from small and medium business needs to enterprise-class applications. This enables you to use the same build-to-order model from Dell or out-of-the-box solutions from HP, NEC, Unisys, or others to achieve minimal downtime.

In addition to these two programs, we are also happy to have our key OEM (original equipment manufacturer) partners focused on delivering solutions that are based on other advanced capabilities of Windows Server 2008 R2, such as Dynamic Hardware Partitioning. Dynamic Hardware Partitioning, available in Windows Server 2008 R2 Data Center and Itanium Editions, takes advantage of enterprise servers that provide advanced partitioning capability to deliver new levels of growth and availability. OEMs have in the past and continue to work closely with Microsoft to deliver hot-addition and hot-replacement of processing resources without the loss of operating system or application state, to deliver continuous scalability and availability solutions for business-critical workloads. Learn more about some of these solutions by clicking on the various partner logos.

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Some of our partners who offer these solutions include: