The world of data is changing. Businesses face growth in the volume of information and the types of data they encounter. There are new landscapes of vast and dynamic information that must be processed, managed and analyzed to achieve business insight. It is no surprise, therefore, that legacy infrastructures are failing to meet I.T.'s expectations.

For many of you this is why you are in Seattle this week -to attend PASS Summit 2014, the SQL PASS organization's annual conference on SQL Server.  You want to learn this week from your peers, from Microsoft, and from vendor's ways to successfully harness SQL Server and drive solutions that do meet your business and user's expectations.

We at Cisco believe that SQL Server on UCS, our Intel? Xeon? processor based compute portfolio, offers the reliability and enterprise-ready performance to optimally support your organization's SQL Server requirements. The solution of SQL and UCS provides a uniquely differentiated architecture with advanced integration at every level in the stack: compute, network, I/O, virtualization and management. For example, the unified computing capabilities unique to UCS enables and accelerates new SQL 2014 features such as in-memory OLTP, in-memory column store, and AlwaysOn Availability Group options.  Here's Cisco VP of Engineering Satinder Sethi speaking on Microsoft SQL Server 2014 and UCS:

During the week of SQL PASS we will be blogging to help educate you on Cisco's architectures, reference configurations, and successes with SQL Server. First up will be Cisco System Engineer Frank Cicalese, our resident SQL Server Guru. His technical blog will focus on "Why Implement SQL on Cisco Unified Computing System?" Following Frank later in the week will be Senior Architect Rick Heiges from our partner Scalability Experts. Rick will focus his blog from a partner point of view commenting on the needs he sees for SQL Server from working with Fortune 500 type customers.

Now for some fun: For those of you attending PASS Summit 2014-either physically in person or digitally online -feel free to take part in our raffle. We will raffle off two prizes each day (Wednesday thru Friday) a set of Beats headphones as well as a$200 gift card. You have two chances to win daily! Our raffle is digital this year, so to enter simply tweet on your UCS comments and stories including the hashtags#CiscoUCS and#sqlpass.  We will draw two random winners each day -so the more you tweet the more you have a chance to win!

To learn more on how SQL Server 2014 on UCS delivers a modern, simple and cost effective database solution please visit www.cisco.com/go/microsoft as well as www.cisco.com/go/sqlserver . Also please download our new Microsoft SQL Server 2014 technical whitepaper, authored by Michael Otey of WindowsITPro.