Being at Cisco Live was a very different experience for me this year. Previous years I spent most of my time in the Intelligent Automation booth discussing functionality in the areas of service catalogs, portals, and orchestration workflows. It was mostly a technical conversation of how to build private cloud catalogs and how to provision infrastructure. This year my Cisco Live experience started off in talking to about 80 partners at the Cisco Connected Architecture Forum Summit; a very interesting crowd. It was here that I talked about what Cisco IT and our Intelligent Automation Solutions Business Unit experience was in deploying private clouds for end users. I discussed Cisco’s private cloud CITEIS, and our new product release Intelligent Automation for Cloud Starter Edition. I discussed Physical and Virtual Clouds and there was much interest in the concept of a services portal and automation construct for both Physical and Virtual clouds, something that is enabled very elegantly with the UCS Manager API. Partners asked great questions: How quickly can they deploy this starter cloud? How do customers chart out their journey to the cloud? Where do they start and what do they do first? Great conversations ensued…
Service Delivery Partners are a key strategy for the deployment of Cisco Cloud software stack. Watch the following interview with Sydney Morgan of Cisco IT and Dave Kinsman from World Wide Technologies, a partner of ours in this area as we talk about the Journey to Cloud and our experiences on the deployment side.
I spent the rest of Cisco Live talking to some great IT organizations about their cloud plans and journey that they are on. Some interesting examples are:
Financial Services: This customer of ours was focused on the deployment of cloud and the changes to the organization as they were coming off of Mainframe centric workloads, deploying them to x86 architectures on UCS. How the application developers would use the newly minted cloud was top of mind.
Service Provider: Many Cloud Service Providers are right at the intersection of business and technology: what service offers can I offer out of the chute to differentiate my company? Discussions around how our IA for Cloud technology stack and pre-built services and automation can make that easier. We also discussed the need and desire to train up their staff to become service designers and workflow authors.
Manufacturer: This customer is focused on operational efficiency and how automation software can reduce the mundane and routine tasks in operations. Replication of system configuration in a standardized way allows their deep application support teams to focus on differentiating their business.
Rebecca Jacoby, Cisco Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, explains how Cisco IT is transforming the way it manages and operates to increase the ability for Cisco technology to bring maximum value to the business. This transformation involved creating an architecture that is “context aware” and allows IT to deliver different levels of services securely.
Rebecca Jacoby, Cisco Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, highlights Cisco’s transformation in the areas of communication and collaboration. Pervasive video has made communication and knowledge sharing extremely efficient and effective at Cisco. Both virtual events and the Integrated Workforce Experience (IWE) internal collaboration platform have been especially influential in enabling greater, more effective communication. Read More »
The cloud battle lines have been drawn out over the past 2-3 years. Is your company getting your CRM from the public cloud? Most definitely! Does your IT shop use one site Service Desk tools or are they using a public cloud provider? Maybe. Did you click the button and put your music in the cloud. Probably.
Many 10’s of billions of enterprise CAPEX and OPEX dollars are spent on enterprise compute and the tools to manage and automate that. IT shops have a very difficult question: Do I invest in building my own private cloud, or do I leverage the public cloud? Many say that a well run private cloud can be cheaper, more secure, and more in tune with internal requirements. Private and Public clouds are vying for your spend and mind share. Who will this battle? How much of a war is this?
Let’s understand that management and automation software has become just as important as your hardware selection as the key ingredient in your compute strategy. This is a war over close to 100B dollars of enterprise and service provide spend.
There is indeed a 3rd player in this war: a company and a service offer that is both pragmatic and in a leadership position. I personally spent close to 6 years in the managed services business earlier in my career and every lesson I learned in managing on-premise, hosted, and private infrastructure for clients all pointed to the most pragmatic approach for how to address client needs: Customer Choice.
News Flash: CSC has selected and is deploying Cisco’s Intelligent Automation for Cloud as the cloud automation engine behind their on-premise private and public cloud offering running on VCE vBlock technology. This is a significant market statement about where infrastructure as a service is going and how to get there. Leveraging the lessons from Cisco IT usage of Intelligent Automation for Cloud (self service, catalog and orchestration) for private cloud management and automation and all the knowledge based best practices that our business unit has harvested over the past 10+ years of experience in automation in public and private clouds, CSC and Cisco and have joined forces in the war. Many other service providers are as well.
If you would like the benefit of a private cloud, but want someone else to operate it, give CSC a call. It will be an intelligent choice for Intelligent Automation from Cisco.
World IPv6 Launch is just around the corner. By June 6, 2012, web companies, major ISPs, and home networking equipment manufacturers are coming together to permanently enable IPv6 for their products and services. Cisco is among them, participating in this global IPv6 launch both as a website operator and leading network solutions provider. As a web company, we’ll be making www.cisco.com permanently IPv6 accessible starting on June 6. Here’s a view into how Cisco IT has been preparing our IPv6 web presence.
The enterprise journey toward IPv6 started almost a decade ago, and the focus on our web presence started a couple of years ago when the Cisco IT team built a small-scale, parallel IPv6 environment in a sandbox network that was used to host static content. We used the domain name www.ipv6.cisco.com, knowing that few people would visit the site. It gave us a chance to get our feet wet with IPv6 while minimizing the risk should something go wrong.
Fast forward to June 8, 2011 and World IPv6 Day when many website operators globally enabled IPv6 access to their production sites and services as part of a 24-hour “test run.” Cisco made www.cisco.com IPv6 accessible on that day. The outcome was a success, and gave all the participants confidence that IPv6 was truly production ready. World IPv6 Day was also a valuable learning opportunity for Cisco IT to better understand what it would take to permanently IPv6-enable our website.
In the year since that test run, our focus has been on preparing for the World IPv6 Launch. The big difference in planning for this launch stems from “the turn it on and leave it on” objective. To leave IPv6 on permanently demands production quality, and production quality demands readiness. Readiness started for us several months ago when we first sought support for World IPv6 Launch from IT and business leaders. Based on our experiences with World IPv6 Day, we knew that planning and delivery would require collaboration across most of the IT organization. So the first step was buy-in at the CIO level to help ensure that all needed teams were at the table.
Next, we turned our attention toward architecture and design. Our primary goals were to:
Leverage the existing production network infrastructure investment and avoid costs of parallel networks.
Ensure production quality and the ability to maintain service levels for www.cisco.com.
The design we chose centers on a reverse proxy model using the Cisco Application Control Engine (ACE). Incoming IPv6 sessions are proxied by the ACE to the existing web tier using IPv4. The network upstream of the ACE is dual stacked, including existing ISP connections.
With the design in place, our attention shifted to network hardware, software, service provider, and application readiness. We performed an assessment using the IPv6 Device Readiness Assessment service to determine whether existing devices in our DMZ and data center networks were capable of supporting IPv6. The assessment showed that existing hardware was capable of supporting IPv6, but software upgrades were required on some platforms. In parallel, we assessed our ISP partners and their ability to dual stack existing connections, as well as our content delivery network provider’s ability to accelerate content delivery for www.cisco.com over IPv6. Based on our experience with World IPv6 Day, we felt comfortable that existing applications and services residing behind the www.cisco.com domain name were compatible with IPv6. The only application that required slight modification was our web analytics system that tracks site usage for www.cisco.com and uses source IP address as a data point. We found that the system vendor supported IPv6 in the product, and we made minor configuration changes to accommodate IPv6 source addresses.
Operational readiness followed, which is a critical stage given the need to maintain production levels of service. With service assurance being top of mind, we enhanced our network management systems to support network, device, and application monitoring over IPv6. We also put together a training program to ensure that everyone, from the front line help desk to network engineers, had the IPv6 knowledge and skills appropriate for their role.
And finally we reached system-level testing, which is where we’re at today. End-to-end testing is under way with QA engineers performing functional and performance checks. Our last test will be a “final practice run” when we temporarily advertise an AAAA DNS record for a couple of hours and validate that everything works end to end in our production environment, including our content delivery network and ISP services.
