As the success of the Internet took hold, the IT infrastructure teams in many enterprises struggled with managing the growth of data center resources in an organized fashion. Older architecture paradigms and models certainly didn’t help, as architectures were generally built in one direction, from business process architecture to application architecture to infrastructure architecture, resulting in a significant amount of custom infrastructure deployed for a wide variety of applications.Cisco IT certainly wasn’t immune to this phenomenon. Despite identifying the need for an infrastructure architecture virtual team and driving principles and standards, the architecture was still too opportunistic — individual application platforms were deployed on common infrastructure deployment if a standard closely matched, but in many cases the deployment architectures were tweaked enough to create a lack of consistency.In addition, Cisco’s continued strategy of moving into adjacent markets saw a need to support new business models within IT systems and architectures: the acquisitions of Linksys and WebEx brought some significant change to Cisco’s traditional IT focus of supporting an innovative manufacturing company.As Cisco IT neared capacity in its existing data center facilities, it made a decision to take a strategic approach in addressing a number of growing pain points in existing facilities — the growing cost of power, the natural disaster risk profiles, and room to expand in these existing locations made expansion very difficult at best. Cisco IT made the decision to address three key points in its data centers: 1) better manage capacity amidst continuing growth in IT applications, 2) reduce risk and improve the resiliency of IT systems, and 3) enable Cisco’s changing requirements with its new business models. These are the core requirements to enabling Cisco’s continued business growth strategy.Cisco IT commissioned a Global Data Center Strategy and tied it to the construction of its Richardson, TX data center and future plans for additional growth. The Richardson data center is the location for Cisco’s core applications base going forward.It’s not as simple as building a new data center and moving or installing the platforms or applications onto new servers on the raised floor, however. Careful consideration must be placed on ensuring that IT systems and business workflows still work well, especially where the infrastructure hosting some SOA services are migrated to a data center distant from existing systems. In many applications and the platforms they’re developed upon, an implicit assumption exists that all of the components are local and are therefore not subject to network latency delays. As we don’t expect the capability to accelerate the speed of packets significantly beyond the speed of light any time soon, this is a serious element that Cisco IT must contend with.Cisco IT is attacking this challenge on multiple levels. First, in planning, Cisco IT is paying careful attention to the interdependencies between IT platforms and is selecting a number of “greenfield” platforms for migration. In many cases, they are timed with major new releases of those IT platforms. Additionally, infrastructure teams are integrating more acceleration capabilities to address the challenges of large-scale data movement during migration and application acceleration during the transition phases. Finally, infrastructure and application teams are partnering to create development and staging environments for application analysis and testing, to include simulation of long-distance network interconnections.Finally, as Cisco IT looks to make the best use of virtualization, including both the typical cost savings targets of virtualization and the more valuable business agility impacts, the traditional IT enterprise architecture model must change. What was once many different custom infrastructure designs for IT application platforms must migrate to a strategic and holistic view at all levels of the architecture stack. Cisco IT is driving a services-based model and virtualization throughout its architecture to enable any application on any network, any time, anywhere.As cloud computing continues to absorb the security, availability, and other elements that make it more enterprise-ready, Cisco IT wants to ensure that its architectures are aligned to make the best use of these capabilities. This includes a services-based approach to infrastructure, based on standards that allow Cisco IT to make the right business decisions on where applications platforms (or portions) should be hosted. Think of it as building Cisco IT’s own internal cloud, and preparing to link it with other clouds.As Cisco IT continues down this path, additional information can be found at the Cisco-on-Cisco web site at http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ciscoitatwork/index.html.