The Cisco Process Orchestrator has very rich integration capabilities, yet we often hear the question, “Does it integrate with…” or “Does it work with” [insert product]. The Cisco Process Orchestrator is a primary component in the Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud management solution.
The fact is that in modern environments with modern orchestrators the answer is always yes. The reality is that cloud automation requires a Process Orchestrator tie into a variety of different systems in order to start offering cloud services. Remember, Cloud is an operating model, not a product. This means that to deliver self-service, on-demand services requires all the elements of the service be orchestrated.
The graphic below shows the components in the deployments. You see integration with Cisco UCS, VMware and storage, as you would expect. It also orchestrates IP address management (that IP won’t provision itself), Remedy incident, CMDB, ActiveDirectory (so tenants can log in), image management and a few other things such as Service Assurance.
By the way, the architecture below is Cisco Process Orchestrator provision across multiple Cisco data centers.
Cisco IT continues to improve upon virtualization and cloud computing capabilities in its Allen, Texas data center. We have added new capabilities in recent months that improve the self-service features available to users. On the Cisco IT Elastic Infrastructure Services (CITEIS) platform, Cisco’s private cloud, users now have the capability to create virtual machines. Additionally, they can enable middleware such as Apache web servers and WebLogic app servers.
To learn more about what Cisco IT is doing in the data center, check out the quick video below.
Private cloud is surrounded by its own mythos--some folks believe it doesn’t exist and some folks believe its something that will only be enjoyed by future generations. So, Cisco IT is living proof that private cloud is something that is very real. This week, tomorrow in fact, John Manville SVP for Cisco IT, will be presenting a session at Gartner Data Center on Cisco’s private cloud environment, Cisco IT Elastic Infrastructure Services or CITEIS. John will explain how Cisco has woven together all the elements (compute, network, storage, automation, orchestration, provisioning, etc) into a cohesive offering that serves our production workloads. John will also share the TCO savings captured to date and how he sees CITIES evolving over the next few years.
If you are at Gartner DC in Las Vegas this week, be sure to check out his session, The Programmable Cloud, tomorrow (Dec 4) at 1:45pm in Titian Ballroom SPS 28--he’ll also be at the Cisco booth (#432) after the session to answer questions.
If you are not at Gartner DC, stay tuned for a coming interview with John Manville, and meanwhile you may want also to take advantage of our coming webcast o see how industry peers are doing to solve the very challenges Cloud adopters face. Tune in to the webcast UCS : Foundation for Cloud on December 6 at 9:00 am PST to hear from Cisco UCS customers Xerox and FICO Corporation, about how and why they used it in their Cloud environments.
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:
