This past week, Thomas Scheibe (Director, Data Center Architecture) had the opportunity to co-present with VMware and NetApp at TechFieldDay on a broad range of Data Center topics.
Thomas is one of the leaders in our Solutions and Strategy Unit (SASU) that is responsible for creating Cisco Validated Designs (CVD). One of the topics discussed was the recent CVD on Enhanced Secure Multi-Tenancy and Thomas asked, “How many of you are familiar with the depth of technical content in a CVD?”
I’m somewhat disappointed to say that the show of hands was less than unanimous. Now this shouldn’t have come as a complete surprise to us, because in the past CVDs were primarily targeted at Network Administrators and the TechFieldDay audience is traditionally more focused on Servers, Storage and Applications. But considering that many of our Data Center solutions are no longer just focused on networking elements, we look at this as an opportunity to create awareness for the Architect and Administrator communities. We also look at it as an opportunity to solicit your input and feedback on how we can better deliver content that will help you design and deploy Data Center solutions that are becoming more complicated as convergence, virtualization, and automation blur the lines between IT organizations. Read More »
Today you are one happy data center manager, because you just made the perfect hire. Your new operations staffer is savvy, with extensive networking knowledge and experience with some of the largest, most sophisticated, and most secure networks in the world. This guy knows the network like the back of his hand. And he’s a demon in the data center: he can optimize data center operations task by task, almost minute by minute. He can predict problems and pre-empt them. It’s as though he is one with your data center and your network.
Actually, he isyour data center and your network—with Cisco Intelligent Automation.
Okay, you say, everyone knows that automation is a good thing. It frees highly skilled IT staff from essential but time-consuming routine maintenance tasks and processes, which typically consume from 70% to 80% of an organization’s IT operational expense, allowing them instead to concentrate on innovation and creating new business value. Automation captures best practices, domain knowledge, and analytics and transforms them into repeated processes triggered by policy and defined events, thus improving efficiency, response time, compliance, visibility, and business continuity. So what’s so special about this Intelligent Automation?
Cisco Intelligent Automation embeds domain knowledge, analytics, and best practices into the network that connects every aspect of your business. It is one with the infrastructure. Think about it. The network is the ideal platform for automation IT operations, not only because the network touches and connects every part of your business, but also because it can capture events and information close to the source, enabling rapid, precise response to events and changes. This network-centric approach to intelligent automation takes advantage of the network’s ability to sense and control data center and IT operations. It also delivers the benefits of Cisco’s innate strengths, including:
Networking Expertise—Leveraging the vast collection of Cisco’s networking intelligence, best practices, methodologies, and tools to support customers better.
Collaborative Partner Approach—Applying the combinedexpertise of Cisco and our global partner ecosystem to meet the total needs of customers worldwide.
Smart, Personalized Services—Gathering, correlating and analyzing data against Cisco intellectual capital to provide proactive or preemptive service experiences.
Innovative Solutions—Creatingnetwork-centric architectural solutions to fully align technology investments to customer business goals.
It’s a well known fact in the IT industry that there is a spending push at the end of the calendar year as companies look to close out their budget. This year-end spending trend represents a great sales opportunity for both Cisco and our partners.
Helping our partners boost profits and provide value to our mutual customers are two core principles of our partner strategy. With that in mind, we recently launched a global sales initiative called “Year-end Sprint” (YES), which will allow us, together with our partners, to capture coveted year-end IT spending.
YES is a collection of several high-value, global architecture product and service offerings for customers that include additional incentives for partners. These offers span our four key architectures: Borderless Networks, Collaboration, Data Center, and Service Provider, including IP NGN and SP Cloud.
According to the recent Cisco Connected World Report, three out of five employees believe they don’t need to be in the office to be productive or efficient at their jobs. Yet 45 percent of IT departments are feeling challenged to provide the mobile, distributed access that workers want. This challenge crosses company sizes, countries and industries, but is especially notable in fields like construction that have traditionally required in-person engagement. Like many IT organizations that must partner with their facilities counterparts, Cisco IT works closely with Cisco Workplace Resources (WPR) and its construction vendors. In our new Texas Data Center 2 (DC2) project, we’re learning that productivity gains for our partners and vendors are gains for us too.
With our local Giants baseball team doing so well Monday night in their journey to clinching the World Series title, I was reminded of the sports maxim of ‘Following through’. Whether it’s with a baseball bat swing, a basketball shot, or a kicking a soccer ball, a follow through is important to take what you started, taking your task through the motion, and setting yourself up for future success. We at Cisco would like to help you follow through with your goal of transforming your infrastructure into a flexible service delivery center and see you symbolically smiling from that winner’s podium raising that trophy.
Part of our strategy for enabling your success is providing validated design guides to deploying our next-generation infrastructure, including the Unified Computing System and Nexus switching family, to speed your journey to the Cloud market while simplifying the transition. We’ve tested these architectures inside our own data centers, with partners, and in customer field trials and have captured and documented best practices around what works (and what doesn’t) in live deployments. As always, these architectures are positioned within our solution frameworks, Unified Service Delivery for Service Providers and Data Center Business Advantage for Enterprises, and we are committed to delivering more value to these Cisco designs.
We publically released a validated design around the Virtualized Multi-Tenant Data Center (VMDC), which allows for the complete end-to-end Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) management of your data center resources across compute, network, and storage. Recent developments include expanded scaling ability which extends support from hundreds to tens of thousands of virtual machines within a single data center. We believe this abstraction of raw resources is an important baseline for extending into the delivery of future applications and services while leveraging a common infrastructure.
