‘Twas the week before Christmas, when all through IT, not a creature was stirring, not even a sysadmin?
Well, not quite. To support the global operations for a Fortune 100 company, the IT staff are always stirring things up at Cisco. But they may be just a little less busy this holiday season. Why? Because Cisco IT deployed a private cloud earlier this year, with a self-service portal and automated provisioning for infrastructure-as-a-service.
This means that employees throughout Cisco can provision and manage the infrastructure resources they need on their own, anytime and anywhere – so our sysadmins can take a break this holiday season (or more likely, they can focus on other IT priorities).
You may have already heard about Cisco IT’s internal private cloud solution, called CITEIS: Cisco ITElastic Infrastructure Services. It’s what we call a “Cisco on Cisco” example, using Cisco’s own Unified Data Center solutions – including Unified Computing, Unified Fabric, and Unified Management with our Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud software.
For a quick overview, here’s a short video about the Cisco IT private cloud:
And if you want more detail, watch this on-demand webinar here.
On December 6th Cisco announced CloudVerse, an integrated set of capabilities that enables customers to deliver cloud applications and services by uniquely combining the unified data center and cloud intelligent network. Key to this is Cisco’s Unified Data Center architecture which is comprised of three technology pillars: Unified Computing, Unified Fabric, and Unified Management.
The following provides a description of CloudVerse, focusing on new cloud management offerings and capabilities that enable customers to build and operate private, public or hybrid clouds… the world of many clouds:
Cisco CloudVerse uniquely combines the unified data center and cloud intelligent network as the platform to deliver cloud services. CloudVerse brings a unique set of advantages:
Assured Cloud Experience by uniquely combining the unified data center and cloud intelligent network
Agile, Dynamic and Efficient Cloud – delivering cost savings and time to market advantages, while simplifying the management and deployment of services
Accelerated Deployment through pre-tested designs like VMDC, through pre-tested ecosystem integrated solutions such as Flexpod and Vblock
Simplified management an operation through integrated management of compute, network and storage – for both the DC and the network
Cisco Unified Data Center provides a complete Data Center infrastructure architecture. It combines compute, storage, network, security and management into a fabric architecture that delivers outstanding performance for physical and virtualized business applications. Created to help companies evolve to cloud computing environments, Unified Data Center embeds automation and simplified operations at the Server, Network and Cloud-Services Layers.
Unified Managementprovides automation and lifecycle management frameworks to manage and simplify the deployment and operations of Network-Layer, Compute-Layer and Application/Cloud-Services-Layer within the Data Center. This includes Cisco UCS Manager, Cisco Network Services Manager, and Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud, as well as the integration with Cisco’s application, virtualization and storage ecosystem partners.
Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud features the newScale self-service portal and service catalog, which has been re-branded as Cisco Cloud Portal, and the Tidal automation software, which has been re-branded as the Cisco Process Orchestrator. Together, we’ve combined and integrated these software products into a powerful and intelligent management solution for enabling IT-as-a-Service.
Cisco Network Services Manager automates and provisions network infrastructure services using powerful abstracted models and policies that define and control the characteristics and behavior of the Cloud, and how Cloud services are accessed by end-users.
Cisco UCS Manager Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) Manager provides unified, embedded management of all software and hardware components in the Cisco UCS. It controls multiple chassis and manages resources for thousands of virtual machines.
To get more information on CloudVerse and Cisco Unified Data Center, please read the following blogs:
Today we are announcing Cisco CloudVerse, an integrated set of capabilities that enables customers to deliver cloud applications and services by uniquely combining the unified data center and cloud intelligent network. CloudVerse is the culmination of Cisco’s data center and network innovation over the last few years and provides our customer with the platform for their journey to the cloud. CloudVerse enables our customers to deliver cloud applications and services with a cloud platform tailored to their needs – whether private, public, or hybrid – in an interconnected world of many clouds.
CloudVerse enables service providers, governments, and enterprises to offer their solutions as a service and deliver them with the full benefits of clouds. CloudVerse’s benefits are greater simplicity in deployment and management of cloud services, stronger security with a more comprehensive approach, faster service agility, improved economics, and an assured experience for cloud users.
CloudVerse integrates the three key elements of a business-class cloud:
Unified Data Center – Bringing together the compute, network, management, and storage elements to offer an integrated platform for applications and services
Cloud Applications and Services – Cisco offers a set of pre-tested applications and services for those companies looking to build and provide cloud services to individuals, businesses, and their own organizations
Let’s dive a bit deeper into what these CloudVerse pillars are comprised of.
The USS Cisco took off for the Gestalt IT Networking Tech Field Day 2 with Captain Omar Sultan (see picture below, courtesy of techfieldday.com), Data Center Solutions Sr. Marketing Manager, at the helm. Tech Field Day networking industry experts gathered on the bridge, cleverly disguised as the Cisco Cloud Innovation Center (CICC) Lab, for an informal, no-holds-barred conversation on recent Nexus portfolio announcements, the continued march towards automated provisioning of cloud services and ever-evolving VM networking technologies.
Captain Omar at Cisco Networking Tech Field Day 2
For those who weren’t at the event or haven’t seen the video recording yet, please excuse my unabashed geekiness, but you’ll have to watch the first minute of the video to get the above reference. As a new member of the Data Center Solutions Marketing team, this is also my first foray into the Cisco blog-o-sphere, so I hope to share some fresh viewpoints on the day’s events.
Several things were made very apparent during the Tech Field Day session:
In case you missed it, the Cisco Intelligent Automation team was at Oracle OpenWorld a couple weeks ago. This fall has been packed with events for our team, ranging from major partner shows like SAP TechEd and VMworld to local Cisco Tech Days – and we’re at VMworld in Copenhagen this week.
That’s because our Intelligent Automation software solutions are relevant across the entire IT landscape. The more resources and applications that Cisco Intelligent Automation manages, the more our customers achieve efficiencies in their data center – including for Oracle applications and database management.
The Oracle event was a success for Intelligent Automation. We had three theater presentations and two demo pods about Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud and Cisco Tidal Enterprise Scheduler for Oracle enterprise applications running on Cisco UCS. We had great discussions about the heterogeneous adapter framework built into these solutions and showed our self-service provisioning and cross-application workload automation capabilities.
Here’s the presentation highlighting the Intelligent Automation solution at OracleWorld:
