So what makes Cloud, Virtualization, and Big Data so interesting? It’s a familiar question for every data center manager and network engineer that manages and designs the networking infrastructure in a datacenter. Like most IT departments, you have been challenged by the cost cutting to control capital outlays and operational expenditures — but now that you have done everything possible to cut costs, how can you continue to operate and innovate with reduced budget? To me, it is all about how to efficiently utilize your data center resources while still evolving and scaling your data center architecture to meet user expectations of accessing consumer and business applications from any place and device at any time.
Cisco continues its innovation leadership with the Nexus portfolio by bringing unmatched architectural flexibility and revolutionary scale with enhanced virtual security; but how do- you leverage these dramatic improvements in technology to address your business needs? How is it possible to drive greater IT capabilities and optimize your data center switching platform such as Nexus while delivering a comprehensive range of world-class, innovative data, communications, and entertainment services to your users?
At Cisco we are committed to providing our customers with the best end-to-end networking. We commit considerable research, time and development to this principle and that includes storage networking. A proof point that customers have been choosing Cisco is the most recent market share reports from Dell’Oro. Cisco’s market share by revenue for Fibre Channel (FC) and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) were up 6.3% for the last quarter and up 7.4% year over year. That brings Cisco to a total of 43.2% market share by revenue! In contrast, our competitors have largely seen diminishing market share in both port and revenue or at best held steady.
Why the market share change? We believe that the market share increases for us is a result of the efficiencies that customer gain when they invest in products in Cisco’s Unified Fabric portfolio, which includes the MDS and Nexus product lines, both of which support multi-protocol operation, meaning Fibre Channel and other protocols. The first phase of the next generation data center is server virtualization and the attendant consolidation, which is currently in full steam at most companies. The next phase is simplification and automation on top of the consolidation and virtualization. The last phase is high-level automation (orchestration) and customer self-service (service portal), or what is generally referred to as private cloud.
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Gartner Data Center 2011, London and Vegas, are over, what are the emerging trends to close out 2011 and lead into 2012?
Cisco was actively involved in both events. The booths and speaking sessions were great opportunities to listen to the IT decision makers, evaluate emerging industry trends, and introduce the Cisco Unified Data Center.
Thanks to all of you who stopped by in person. For those of you not in attendance, here are some highlights.
Giuliano Di Vitantonio, Cisco VP Data Center and Switching Marketing, Presenting Cisco Unified Data Center
Cisco hit an important milestone recently: in just over 2 years, well over 9,000 customers worldwide have deployed the Unified Computing Solution (UCS) in their data center. In that time, Cisco has amassed a dozen top industry awards, supported over 10,000 applications, held 51 world-record performance benchmarks, and achieved over $1 Billion annualized run-rate. Customers across every industry vertical have put UCS to work in a myriad of environments: business analytics and data warehousing, mission critical CRM, ERP, enterprise collaboration, email, databases, RISC migration, and in a very big way – desktop virtualization. Read More »
Have you ever sat in on a TelePresence meeting? It really makes you think about how technology can make distance disappear, and bring together people across a wide geography for the purpose of collaborating and sharing ideas. Such is the case with the National Townhall on Desktop Virtualization I participated in recently, along with VMware.
Seven industry experts from seven US cities, discussing the impact or key learnings of implementing desktop virtualization in government, healthcare and education. I was joined by my colleague Chris Westphal of VMware, and our panelists, bringing firsthand experiences of their journey to desktop virtualization. If you want to attend the interactive webcast of this event, please click here – I think you’ll find it incrementally valuable if you’re on the verge of a pilot, proof of concept or just researching your options.
This experience reminded me of something important regarding the transformation of the user desktop as we know it. Immersive business video is increasingly becoming a modality of enterprise collaboration that workers will depend on to be productive. Consider the fact that ten people had meaningful discourse in this session, without any of them having to board a plane. IP telephony is the same – we can’t imagine a day without access to our phone. So when we talk about using virtual desktops making people more productive, and making business more agile, it makes total sense that we expect by extension of that premise, voice, video and virtual desktops to converge in a single workspace that’s accessible on any device, anywhere. We depend on all of these modalities to be effective, not just one.
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I’ve looked at Clouds from both sides now.
In the US, we’re running a 7-city tour, training Partner Sales Reps & SEs on Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud. We’ve just finished training in a fourth city, including Cisco reseller, system integration and technology Partners from the Western Hemisphere. Meanwhile, in London this week, leaders from the Intelligent Automation Solutions Business Unit are conducting sales enablement training for Partners as well as Direct Sales Reps and SEs from all over EMEA. On either side of the Pond scores of people are being brought up to speed on how to identify, qualify, and sell Cisco’s Cloud management solution.
Here in London, a handful of different languages ask the same question “How do we clearly and compellingly articulate the value of cloud computing and cloud management to our customers?”
For the last decade, IT organizations have faced the challenge of managing budgets that are 70-80% channeled towards maintenance costs while business demands are growing faster than ever. The result is that many requests for new projects have to be turned down and more and more business opportunities are missed.
If we look within the data center, the majority of the costs is associated with people and software, but the the root cause of those costs is legacy infrastructure that is very complex and expensive to manage. The flaws of this legacy infrastructure are often masked by layers of complex management software, which have developed to stitch together systems that were not designed to be integrated.
Legacy infrastructure prevents business agility and financial efficiency because it was not designed for environments like Cloud that require fast deployment, automated provisioning of resources, open-API’s, and “self-service” consumption models by business users. Nor was it designed for environments where physical and virtual resources have to co-exist. Finally, it assumed operational models that can’t meet the Performance, High Availability and Security requirements in the context of workload mobility and deep integration between compute, network and storage environments.
As a result of all this, Data Centers have evolved towards an accidental architecture that still contains too many silos of applications that are difficult to maintain and manage.
For these reasons, Cisco has created the Unified Data Center platform, which provides a new approach to design the data center infrastructure and prepares our customers for the opportunities that Cloud will bring along in the future.
Cisco has a long history of anticipating the convergence of technologies in an effort to reduce costs, streamline operations, or unlock new ways for the business to leverage technology. Cisco has a deep understanding of these transitions, having helped reshape the industry numerous times in the past, most notably with the convergence of voice and data. We are now doing the same by bringing together Compute, Network, Storage and Management within and across Data Centers.
Successful transitions involve new ways of not only thinking about the business challenges, but also about designing the underlying technologies to be agile, efficient, and simplified. Bolting together existing technologies doesn’t deliver the desired result.
A Unified approach is needed to unlock this new business potential.
By now you have may have seen the Cisco announcement of the Unified Data Center and Unified Management http://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?type=webcontent&articleId=578106. This exciting story around Unified Management began in the late summer of 2010 when the engineering team in Cisco’s Tidal Software acquisition began the integration of the Tidal Enterprise Orchestrator and the UCS Manager. We realized that we could take our experience with hundreds of customers in application automation and apply that toward infrastructure automation, specifically around provisioning, virtualization and cloud. Our future was cloudy and that was indeed a good thing.
Five months later after intensive technical and business innovation, in the third week of January in 2011, the Intelligent Automation Solutions Business Unit introduced our cloud automation suite which brought the ease of Amazon EC2 to the private cloud for both physical and virtual clouds. The solution consisted of newScale’s self service and service catalog technology, integrated to the Tidal Enterprise Orchestrator for automation of infrastructure provisioning and IT operations management tool integrations. I had been a customer of both of these companies at a previous job and had experienced the benefits of automating both the end user and back end systems with these two companies. With the new use cases of data center and cloud automation I was convinced that these technologies could be the basis of something transformational for our customers.
According to Friday’s Dec 2, 2001, Wall Street Journal , Google will have a 1-day shipping service to challenge Amazon’s Prime service. The news reminded me of some great talks I was able to attend at CA World 2011 in Las Vegas. One of the talks was by Dr. Timothy Chou of Stanford University on Cloud computing applications. Another was by Cisco VP Marie Hattar on the impact of an intelligent network on our lives. The third was on the future of application development by CA Technologies CTO Dr. Ferguson, who I knew from working in the WebSphere organization at IBM.
Dr. Chou’s talk was in three parts -- namely the economics of the Software business, kinds of applications possible with cloud computing, and the new generation of cloud applications. The service Google is embarking on is precisely the kind of application we can expect where software provides a context sensitive service while understanding the customer’s needs. Dr. Chou illustrated the evolution of software delivery starting with the traditional license model to open source software, then to outsourcing and finally Software as a Service. He showed the economic efficiency of Cloud computing (Software as a Service).
He went on to state that the ad-based revenue model that Google has embraced allows them to deliver the search software to users at a fraction of the cost of the traditional license model. In the second part of the talk, Dr. Chou described how cloud computing innovation lies in the business model and not just technology. He identified application services that can benefit the most from the cloud model, namely high growth applications and those that have highly variable demand characteristics. He speculated that cloud services would be specialized and differentiated based on location, performance and innovative business models such as spot pricing.
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Do you want to know what’s happening at the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas on the Cisco side ?- Here are a couple of hints, before a more comprehensive report in the following days
-Giuliano Di Vitantonio, Cisco VP Data Center and Switching Marketing will discuss tomorrow Tuesday December 6th at 1:45 pm (room Octavius 23)how Cisco data Center solutions help customers to achieve business agility, financial efficiency and IT simplification. As the pace of business continues to place strains on IT departments Cisco’s unified data center solutions bring together computing, networking, storage, and management resources to deliver a more cost-effective, secure, and efficient IT operating environment.
In addition, of this session, Satinder Sethi, Vice President, UCS Solutions Engineering, Ecosystems, and Technical Marketing, will explain on December 7th at 9:00 am (room Augustus 5) why the Unified Computing Systems are the preferred platforms for virtualization and cloud . Read More »
Earlier this year the Webtorials Analyst Division, co-founded by Dr. Jim Metzler, surveyed their subscriber base of IT professionals. Not surprisingly, 75% admitted that when a core business application degrades in performance, the end user notices before IT does. Therefore, 85% also believe that it is important, very important and even critical to senior managers that they take a more proactive approach to managing acceptable application delivery (See Figure 1).
Source: Metzler, Jim, “2011 Application & Service Delivery Handbook”, p. 14
Contributing to the challenges of ensuring good application performance are the very innovations that are meant to simplify business and IT operations. These include data center consolidation, virtualization and the wide variety of applications that IT must support– all of which creates operational issues for IT. Not to worry – there are best practices that IT organizations can implement as application delivery challenges continue to evolve. In Part I of this blog post on application and services delivery, I’ll share what I consider to be key learnings from Dr. Metzler’s comprehensive 129 page guide. We’ll start with some core challenges:
Key Application Delivery Challenges
Proliferation of different types of applications: Today, companies utilize a wider variety of applications than ever. Some applications are business-critical. Others enable other business functions. And still more applications support communication and collaboration. Not only do they vary in criticality, but they also vary in their demands on the network. For instance, video streaming, which causes a lot of strain on the network may be key on some occasions (think company-wide all hands meetings a la Apple’s tribute to Steve Jobs), but recreational during other times. IT managers must audit company-wide application use, pinpoint a select group of business critical applications and formulate and execute a plan for optimization.
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Time to close on this topic for me with a brief update from one of Cisco’s strategic partners, VMware, and one of our European customers, Colt. You can find parts 1, 2 and 3 of my conference update in my previous blogs.
Colt are a European service provider, one of the growing number adopting Cisco Unified Computing (see Cisco UCS gaining serious steam). A few of my colleagues in Cisco Data Center Services recently helped one of the Colt teams adopt the Cisco Unified Computing System for their cloud roll-out. The Colt Data Center Services team were at the conference last week -- this part of Colt offer wholesale data center space and I talked to them about their Modular Data Center offering.
With VMware -- who need no introduction -- I asked what was top of mind for them.
You can see and hear from both companies in this short video.
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London's Big Ben at Night
Following on from my introductions to what is happening at this data center conference see part 1 and part 2), in this article I’ll talk more about something I’ve not really blogged about in my previous blogs (which is surprising given my NMS background) - data center management and Cisco Intelligent Automation. I managed to catch up with a senior manager in the Cisco IT team, Rich Gore, who game me some terrific insight into their deployment of Cisco Intelligent automation. And I’ll also relate some experience of my own on why, when it comes to the products you produce, you should always (as the US folks tend to say) “eat your own dog food”!
Why exactly would IT organizations want to converge their LAN and SAN?
For years, organizations have been running separate, parallel networks in their datacenter: an Ethernet-based LAN to connect servers, clients, and a storage area network (SAN) to connect servers to the storage pool. Collapsing these networks down to a single common network infrastructure could save capital costs by eliminating redundant switches, cables, networking cards, and adapters. Customers could immediately realize cost savings by simplifying the network administration.
Organizations can achieve these benefits:
Efficiency. Eliminate infrastructure redundancy.
Agility. Provides the ability to set up, move, and change both physical and virtual servers faster to easily respond to ever changing business needs.
IT transformation. Enablesdatacenter consolidation, and supports a capacity demand model that help IT organizations do more with less.
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Big Ben in central London
Yesterday (see part 1) I started my discussion on the Gartner Data Center Conference with a picture of a castle close to my house; today I will start with what I saw as I emerged from the London Underground stop near to the conference hotel -- the iconic Big Ben and the UK Houses of Parliament.
In this blog, I will discuss some of the key data center questions and feedback that I heard from some of our customers at the conference today. I’ve also included a short video clip which shows some of the cooler technologies and solutions on show at the conference today, not just Cisco, but some of the other exhibitors too.
So what are some of the focus areas among the technology suppliers at the show?
For Cisco, with the new Cisco Unified Management for Data Center and Cloud, Cisco Intelligent Automation for Data Center and Cloud is the focus of our main demo today, which we are showing alongside the Cisco UCS Manager.
