“Applications?” I hear you say. ”Why are Cisco talking about application? They’re a networking company!?” If this is what you are thinking, I’m glad you are reading this blog. As we’ve broadened to be an IT company, we in Cisco Services have been quietly building our application migration capability for the past 2 years. And with cloud, as the leading designers of cloud IaaS infrastructure, we in Cisco Services are in a unique position to help you migrate applications to the cloud, where the skillsets required are not only application migration, but a deep understanding of how to enable your applications to genuinely exploit the capabilities of your cloud infrastructure.
Which takes me to the subject for this blog, Domain 8 in the Cisco Domain TenSM framework -- Applications, following on from my Domain 7: Platform discussion the other week. In our view in Cisco Services, (business) applications are the primary reason for the existence of the data center. Applications drive so many of the decision in the other facets of the data center. And when it comes to cloud (which is my theme for this Cisco Domain Ten series), there are additional considerations related to migrating applications to the cloud. Let’s discuss some of these in this blog.
This week at the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas, Cisco Services is unveiling Cisco Domain Ten(SM) – Cisco’s Framework for Simplifying Data Center and Cloud Transformation.
Cisco Domain Ten can be applied to a diverse range of data center projects -- from cloud and desktop virtualization to application migration and is equally applicable whether your data center is in enterprise businesses, public sector organizations or service providers. The video here describes how we apply the Cisco Domain Ten to the private cloud use case, as one example. We’ll discuss additional use cases in future blogs and associated collateral that I’ll point you to.
Born from our extensive experience over the past years in helping customers transform their data centers, based upon the many cloud deployments -- private and public, enterprise, public sector and service provider -- that we’ve enabled over the past few years, we’ve formulated this comprehensive framework to help you transform your data center and guide new initiatives including cloud, virtual desktop, application migration, and data center consolidation. The Cisco Domain Ten framework covers ten key areas -- domains -- that -- based upon our experience -- are critical to consider, plan for and address as part of your data center and cloud transformational journey, and is illustrated in the diagram below. Relating this framework to other key components of Cisco’s data center strategy, you can think of the Cisco Unified Data Center as the what of the data center, whereas Cisco Domain Ten complements this by guiding you on the how (to transform).
Cisco Domain Ten - Simplifying Data Center Transformation
In any industry, customers running critical applications are typically slow to move to something new. Whether it is a new technology, platform, application, or service provider, people tend to be comfortable with the status quo and it is human nature to try to avoid a “CNN moment” or a resume generating bad decision resulting from implementing something new ->thus, people tend to avoid making changes to their critical workload environment. However, as new solutions or technologies become available and mature, the “I don’t want to be first” mantra is eventually followed by “Oh-oh- looks like I am last” when the realization you are falling behind your competition (who have already adopted the new technology) starts to set in. Finding that point in time when a new technology- solution-product has reached an adequate state of maturity to meet your particular needs and requirements is paramount when considering changes to a critical workload environment.
My brush with being a part of a “CNN moment” was from my past life in the Telco world (circa early 2000’s)- Read More »
