We’re in the sporting and cultural capital of Australia this week for Cisco Live! Did you know that Melbourne is the only city in the world that has five international standard sporting facilities surrounding its central business district?
You might see a rugby match while in town, but I’d suggest you also tackle the Cisco Live World of Solutions expo. We have an exciting demo to show you in the Cisco Data Centre booth: Intelligent Automation for Cloud, a key component of the Unified Management pillar of our Unified Data Center platform.
Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud is a cloud management and orchestration software solution that complements Cisco UCS and Nexus to provide self-service on-demand provisioning of IT resources. This new solution is becoming as ubiquitous as the sporting facilities in Melbourne. Cisco partners including Alphawest / Optus, CSC, and VCE are also showcasing our Intelligent Automation for Cloud software in action at their booths.
Essentially, this solution will help you tackle the challenge of deploying infrastructure-as-a-service – and adopt an IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) strategy. Here’s a short analyst video on delivering ITaaS with Cisco Intelligent Automation:
You are probably thinking that CITEIS is a typo – but it’s not. In fact, CITEIS stands for Cisco IT Elastic Infrastructure Services and it’s the name that Cisco’s IT department coined for our internal private cloud.
You can read more about CITEIS here, including an explanation of the two options: CITEIS “Express” for on-demand access to virtual compute resources from a shared pool of resources; and CITEIS “VDC” (Virtual Data Center) to provision your own virtual data center with a reserved pool of compute, storage, and network capacity.
We recently recorded a brief demo video of the Express version so you can see how it works:
IT shops deploying clouds over the past year have been focused on Infrastructure as a Service ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrastructure_as_a_service#Infrastructure ) as a way to drive speed in virtual and physical server provisioning, cost savings in operations, proactive service level agreements, and increased control and governance. In one of my blogs I introduced our Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/the-secret-is-now-out-you-can-simplify-cloud-deployments-with-cisco-unified-management/ and how that addresses both private, hybrid and public clouds IaaS. Key to this is the service catalog and self service portal. Moving to cloud is NOT about taking hundreds of server configuration templates and moving to them immediate self service. All you are doing in that model is automating VM sprawl. They key is defining a limited set of services and options that your end users such as application owners and technical folks can order through a self service portal and manage their life-cycle.
Our team is excited and ready for a great week at Cisco Live Europe! We’ve been working on demos, speaking sessions, and social events for the conference – and it’s finally here.
There are several conference sessions on intelligent automation and cloud computing. Follow us at @CiscoIA on Twitter where we’ll post updates and reminders about key sessions.
In fact, you may have to choose between some great breakout sessions being held at the same time. Here are a few of the key sessions that feature Intelligent Automation:
Converged Infrastructure and Orchestration with Vblock and Cisco Intelligent Automation -- BRKSPS-2202 (Tuesday, Jan 31, 14:15 pm)
Cloud Automation -- BRKNMS-2659 (Friday, Feb 3, 9:00 am)
Create “Network Containers” in a Multi-Tenant Data Center -- BRKNMS-3999 (Friday, Feb 3, 9:00 am)
Orchestration of UCS via Cisco Process Orchestrator -- BRKDCT-3105 (Friday, Feb 3, 11:00 am)
At Cisco Live this week, you’ll learn how our Unified Management solutions deliver intelligent automation for intelligent infrastructure solutions in a Unified Data Center approach:
When you’re ready to unwind after the big first day, join the data centre team at 18:30 for a meet-up at the W XYZ bar in the Aloft ExCel Hotel next to the conference. Here’s your personal invitation.
And for even more fun, play the Cisco pinball in the World of Solutions! There are prizes for high scores every day, with a pinball challenge on Wednesday at 16:00 – follow @CiscoPinball on Twitter for details.
We look forward to meeting you – enjoy the conference!
I have talked to many enterprises that want a private cloud; also service providers that want to build a public cloud based upon Cisco UCS / Nexus. They all would like to get to their first generation of cloud very quickly. We have many conversations on infrastructure to use, the right choice of hypervisor, and what use cases to start with. Today I talked to a customer of our Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud that wants a differentiating end user portal. Everyone can spin up a VM, but how to do it in a way that will drive adoption and new business, whether it is for the enterprise or service provider? How do we do this at a cost and a timeline that meets the needs of the business and the CIO.
These are not lightweight concerns. I have seen many data center automation projects that focused too much on the provisioning and not enough on the end user experience. The Intelligent Automation Solutions Business Unit at Cisco has been involved with many customers building private and public clouds with our software stack. This includes Cisco IT’s very large private cloud deployment based upon our software. The two services they deployed: CITEIS (Cisco IT Elastic Infrastructure Services) Express and CITEIS VDC (Virtual Data Center) has received broad acclaim. Watch the following videos by Jamie MacQuarrie of the Intelligent Automation team on these two CITEIS Services.
