Cisco has said on Friday that announced that in just over two years its new Cisco Unified Computing System, (Cisco UCS) which integrates compute, networking, management and virtualization, has captured the attention of data center managers and CIOs alike– over 10,000  customers worldwide, including 3,000 in Europe, have deployed UCS.

Many industry observers were skeptical that a new computing technology could take hold in this highly competitive market, but the cost and business benefits proved compelling across all industries and all workloads.  Since it began shipping in July 2009, UCS has captured 53industry benchmark performance world records, and garnered a dozen industry awards for innovation.

According to a recent Servers and Virtualization Study by TheInfoPro, Cisco took the lead among server vendors in vision, technical innovation, product performance, and sales force. Cisco was named by 33 percent as “the most exciting server vendor,” eight percentage points ahead of the second placed vendor.

The 2011 Cisco Cloud Index forecasts that cloud computing is transforming business: over 50 percent of computing workloads in data centers are predicted to be cloud-based by 2014, and global cloud traffic will grow over 12 times by 2015, to 1.6 zettabytes per year – the equivalent of over four days of business-class video for every person on earth.  This explosive cloud growth requires the advanced data center capabilities provided by UCS to support end-to-end cloud application delivery.

Designed from the ground up with a “clean slate” approach, Cisco UCS is an integrated system, designed to optimize compute, networking, storage access, virtualization and management. UCS tapped into a powerful market demand for a new approach to computing, enabling IT organizations to unleash new business models with its innovative, integrated architecture.

Customers are able to reduce the time to deploy new applications, improve business agility and reduce costs. UCS is the first fabric computing platform that combines industry-standard, x86-architecture servers with networking and storage access into an integrated system. Cisco works with industry-leading infrastructure and software vendors, including BMC, CA, Citrix, EMC, Hitachi Data System, Microsoft, NetApp, Oracle, Red Hat, SAP, VMware to provide pre-tested, end-to-end solutions.