After the SQL Saturday event this week I will be staying in Barcelona for a few more days to attend the Microsoft TechEd Europe from Tuesday Oct 28^thto Friday Oct 31^st! As Gary Serda laid out in his blog, Cisco has a lot of great demos to share with you. See details: http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/cisco-at-microsoft-teched-europe-2014/

• Cisco UCS and Integrated Infrastructures for Microsoft Private Cloud
• Windows Server 2003 Migration to Windows Server 2012 R2 and Cisco UCS
• UCS Management with Microsoft System Center
• UCS for Microsoft SQL Server
• Nexus 1000V Network Virtualization with Microsoft Hyper-V

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, "Cisco is Here to Help!-Microsoft Windows Server 2003 End-of-Life Support,"  Windows Server 2003 (WS2003) Migration to Windows Server 2012 R2 on Cisco UCS is, as we like to say the social media world, trending.  I am really excited about the demo covering this topic because it brings together all the value props of Microsoft and Cisco working together to help customers solve one of their most important data center challenges.

In that blog, I touched on what Cisco and Microsoft are saying, but what are our customers saying?

Head of ICT management and maintenance, Elektroprivreda, Haris Brkanic mentioned in the case study that moving to Windows Server 2012, they were able to migrate from 42 physical servers and 90 virtual servers on seven hosts to just 12 Cisco UCS servers.  They are realized significant cost saving and performance gains in this upgrade. They also love that they can manage everything from a single pane of glass. Our customer definitely experienced the simplified IT, better virtualization, and licensing and support benefits they were hoping to get.

In addition, Forrester (link) also interviewed six customers who have upgraded to Windows Server 2012 R2 from Windows Server 2008 or 2012. They experienced:

• Reduce Windows Server Management cost up to 35%
• See a return on investment of up to 270%
• Reduce or eliminate hypervisor solution costs.

It is clear to me that Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 on Cisco UCS with Intel? Xeon? Processors, delivers the features to help customers meet business demand in a cost effective manner and provides the foundation for a cloud strategy that makes sense.  Hmmm, maybe a future blog topic.

If you are new to Cisco, Build and Price is a great way to learn and take advantage of Cisco UCS promotions. https://apps.cisco.com/ccw/cpc/guest/home.do#!/content/ucsPromotionDetails/ucsPromotions

Hope to see you in Barcelona. Follow @gserda and @ReneeYao1 and join the conversation via the#TEE14 and#CiscoUCS hashtags.