Joann Starke

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Agility is highly sought after in today’s business environment.   It allows your business to rapidly adapt to market changes or competitive pressures.  It enables your business to capture new opportunities and customers without expanding your staff or increasing costs.  To accomplish these objectives you need one thing:  automation.  Automation delivers the key element for business […]

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How quickly can your organization stand-up a new application or deploy new services?  Most customers tell me, “not fast enough!”   I am clearly hearing from them that the new standard expectation across the organization is to receive precise data center resources in “internet time,” easily and definitely on-demand. But customers are not the only […]

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Organizations are realizing that without a formal comprehensive cloud strategy, line of business and application architects will continue to sidestep their internal IT organizations and procure solutions on their own – an industry phenomenon known as “rogue IT” which happens out of necessity.  While it helps solve the immediate problem, it brings with it a […]

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Private cloud – you hear it everywhere.  Industry analysts tell us that private cloud has become a core data center strategy  well on its way to becoming a core element in the formal IT portfolio. Forrester research indicates that CIOs and IT departments are strongly drawn to private cloud as the on-ramp for their cloud […]

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Forrester research indicates that private cloud has entered into the formal IT portfolio by becoming a core part of data center strategy.   I have been writing about the sea change underway in private cloud.  This sea change means that automating the provisioning of virtual machines and their infrastructure is inadequate in a world where your […]

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The connections between your business success and data center efficiency have never been clearer or stronger. Delivering data center resources quickly to capitalize on new business opportunities or projects is a major factor for business success. The only way to expedite resource delivery is by replacing manual processes with repeatable, best-practice-based automated service consumption and […]

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The increasing pace of business is creating high demand for IT efficiency and speed. IT directly affects your ability to respond correctly and quickly to new opportunities.  Slow IT equates to slow business. The latest release of Cisco UCS Director allows IT to automate the deployment of infrastructure delivering the speed and efficiency IT needs […]

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Businesses move quickly until they have to cross rough roads paved with technical challenges. That’s because even though data centers are sophisticated, the components that support most businesses still include far too many 20th century manual processes, silo based resources and administrators pressured to keep up. Although automation can speed up IT, and your business, […]

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Automation was a major theme at VMWorld 2014 in Barcelona this month and it was clear that IT professionals are discovering that they can’t keep pace with business using manual provisioning and de-provisioning processes. The problem is that with the physical boundaries of time and space, there simply isn’t enough staff to meet the need. […]

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Every organization needs more from their data centers, such as faster services and data analysis for real-time decision making.  The unprecedented expansion of data is a major driver of rapid data center transformation.  Consider these statistics: 90% of all data in the world was created in the last three years Data centers handled 214 exabytes […]

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Most of us expect immediate delivery both as consumers and as employees. As employees, we are no longer willing to wait weeks for IT to deliver what we need. IT departments feel the pain that ensues from our urgency in the form of shadow IT.  Shadow IT results in the double trouble of higher risk […]

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Data center strategy is a critical part of business strategy. In fact, the ways and means of IT deployment make all the difference between an efficient, successful organization and an ineffective one. Therefore, to align and adapt quickly to the needs of business, IT is changing the delivery mechanisms of infrastructure resources. Part of the […]

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Organizations are rethinking their data centers and nothing is off limits for discussion – everything from infrastructure to software to processes, and even more fundamentally, the very ways in which a data center serves the business. One element that is empowering this phenomenal shift is IT automation. It is vital. No automation, no effective IT. […]

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In previous blogs I have described how organizations are maturing beyond provisioning of individual servers to provisioning of richer cloud-based application stacks.  Known as platform-as-a-service (PaaS), this capability takes cloud technology beyond infrastructure to automate the application life cycle.  PaaS allows developers and IT operations to collaborate and ensure that application stacks are consistent and […]

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At a recent event I saw a T-shirt that said “Remember when cloud only meant rain?”  In the days before cloud computing, asking someone what they thought about cloud usually invoked a response about an animal-shaped formation or looking at cumulonimbus and predicting precipitation. One thing that today’s IT clouds have in common with their […]

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Imagine that you head the leading telecommunications provider in Italy and you are watching traditional service and revenue streams struggle under intense competitive pressure. Customer retention is a major issue because the types of services required by your residential and business clients are changing. Clearly, you need to retain customers and do so by offering […]

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Every area of your business has a stake in the way IT delivers services. Each one needs speed, agility, efficiency, and a clear definition of its relationship with all of the other areas and the business as a whole. In order to get there and create an agile and efficient organization that flows, you need […]

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Cloud is changing the way businesses deploy and manage IT and business services. Industry analysts estimate that by the end of 2014, four out of 10 companies will have deployed a private cloud. But where do you start? Join Cisco and Forrester on February 18th, for this live webcast entitled: Cloud Management: It’s More than […]

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Whether working with bare-metal servers or virtual machines; provisioning applications and infrastructure traditionally are independent tasks that are completed by different data center teams. Infrastructure is usually provisioned manually. Applications are customarily provisioned via golden templates. As customers look to move automation beyond infrastructure to include applications, the maintenance complexity and manual “last mile” configuration […]

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Major change and growth is happening in the way data centers are functioning. This change is being led by cloud technology. IT’s role is changing from an infrastructure provider to strategic business partner. The new role for IT is to align you with the services you need, when you need them, from a portfolio of […]

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Congratulations on your hot new project! It is critical to your organization expanding its revenue base; it’s top of mind for your manager and the CIO. What’s that? You did all the planning, but you can’t start for four weeks? Oh, right—that’s how long IT needs to get you the necessary infrastructure resources. Let’s change the perspective. […]

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Delivering unified management for converged infrastructure solutions, Cisco UCS Director is an award-winning choice for managing your vBlock, FlexPod or other converged infrastructure solution.  In previous blogs, I have mentioned the benefits of Cisco UCS Director: How it abstracts the virtualization, compute, network and storage layers into a single pane of glass that reduces the […]

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Cisco’s cloud software is a hot topic.  First Cisco UCS Director was voted the SVC award winner for best virtualization management software.  Then Forrester released a new Private Cloud Wave and both Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (IAC) and UCS Director combined garnered Cisco the highest ranking for cloud vision and strategy as well as […]

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Last night we received the news that Cisco UCS Director (formerly Cloupia) won the product of the year award in the category of virtualization management by the SVC Awards. Each year SVC rewards the top products, projects, companies and teams operating in the cloud, virtualization and storage sectors.  This SVC award provides validation of the […]

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If you have been following the news, I'm sure you saw that Cisco just introduced Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI). Combine ACI with Cisco UCS Director and you can...

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In order to provide important services and innovations that better align to business, data centers must deploy advancecd IT architectures. Who says? IDC. In fact, this month they reported that adoption of integrated systems has moved from evaluation to mainstream. And yet IT remains besieged. What is the essence of the problem? Traditional management tools. […]

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We have to propel new use cases for cloud because customers want more than IaaS. And they don’t want to be tied to vendors’ annual product release cycles to get it. But, as they extend cloud-based service delivery beyond IaaS and aim higher in the sky, their heads smack into the ceiling of cloud management. […]

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As cloud technology and organizations mature, customers are shifting their focus from the provisioning of individual servers to richer cloud-based application platform stacks. Why? Servers usually do not exist as standalone entities but are designed to run something tangible for the business. For example, multi-tier application platform stacks have in their design multi-server elements such […]

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Cloud platforms are an increasingly viable option for a growing set of enterprise and service provider workloads. A recent IDC report estimated that private cloud software, including hosted private cloud, represented 62% of IT spending in 2012. Cisco is a unique cloud provider because it delivers solutions for the two critical management bookends for your […]

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Of course you would. In a recent Forrester report on the economic impact of FlexPod, that is exactly the cost savings estimated by utilizing centralized automation and orchestration. So I ask, what new projects or services could your IT organization deliver with cost savings of $264,000? To get a copy of the Forrester report, go […]

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Have you caught the new “Star Trek” summer blockbuster yet? If you’re a Trekkie, you know that one of the spin-offs of the original series was “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” and the Star Trek universe just continues to evolve. This puts me in mind of where our industry is heading today with the next-gen […]

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Two years ago Swisscom AG switched to cloud-based service deployment for their customers, but unfortunately, the switch ran into a hitch … As more customers move from landlines to mobile devices, the mobile market continues to increase in size and complexity and become more competitive. To create new revenue streams, many telcos are finding it […]

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Increase Profits by Making it Easy to Follow the Money Hundreds of cloud service providers around the world are seeing businesses connect into their clouds in increasing numbers. You might think this goes into the category of a “good problem to have.” So growth that should be great news for the bottom line, isn’t yet […]

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Successful IT managers today and in the future need to quickly adapt to changing business strategies. But how does IT increase efficiency, support more applications and provide additional services with flat or decreasing IT budgets? In my previous blog, I discussed how Cisco, EMC, NetApp, and VCE introduced converged infrastructures to increase IT efficiency and […]

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There is a lot of buzz in the market about Cisco Cloupia and how it is positioned relative to other Cisco solutions such as Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud.   The term cloud is often used interchangeably for automated infrastructure provisioning as well as for true clouds, as mentioned in my previous blog.  To better understand […]

Customers have often said to me, “Joann, we have virtualization all over the place. That’s cloud isn’t it?”   My response is, “Well not really, that is not a cloud, but you can get to cloud!”  Then there is a brief uncomfortable silence, which I resolve with an action provoking explanation that I will now share […]