UCS and a Team Approach

Over the years at my organization we often would comment on the quantity of work our IT group is doing to meet the needs of the healthcare organization. We did all of the upgrades for Y2K, expanded with mergers, installed more and more specific systems while not really added FTEs to the mix. Through this time I found the quality of work produced to be very high with a focus on why we are doing what we do; to provide quality healthcare.

Contemplating recently about the successful implementation of Cisco UCS and our clinical data warehouse project it got me thinking about what things went into the success. I have touched on things in this blog about getting funding, short time lines, positive experience with Cisco Advanced Services, the UCS technology and how my staff worked well together.

I think I may have overlooked how important having a staff that works well together can play such a strong role in the success of a UCS implementation. This insight has grown out of a lot of interaction with other organizations around reference calls for Cisco UCS. I have been able to take it for granted skilled engineers with many years of experience in SAN, LAN, servers, virtualization and application delivery who all have the same reporting structure and get along. In addition, management who recognizes individual skills and talents which allows staff to explore new technologies. So I want to give a big thank you to my team for knocking it out of the park with Cisco UCS, you rock!

Yes, Cisco UCS is a very cool, state of the art system for delivering compute capacity but a successful implementation does not just happen. I think UCS can sing when an organization is able to work together as a team to pull all of the components together. Talking with some organizations where the server and network folks do not talk with the storage folks would be a very difficult environment to be successful. On the other hand, putting in a system like Cisco UCS may bring the groups together and may simplify and clarify the need for interactions.