Is your organization looking to build a cloud?
You’ll want to learn how Cisco’s John Manville leveraged an internal, private, infrastructure-as-a-service cloud to drive business value.
John Manville is responsible for Cisco’s Global IT infrastructure – which includes the data centers, networks, platforms and more. Overall, John’s role is to implement Fast IT, which is really about being adaptable and responsive to business needs.
What technology helps drive this responsiveness and adaptability? “There are many solutions that can help, but if I had to sum it up in one word, that word is cloud” replied John .
Cisco uses internal cloud technology for several important business imperatives. Through the cloud, we are balancing internal IT workloads and providing our engineering team the tools needed for OS development. We are also using the internal cloud for external capabilities. For example, Cisco Smart Services uses our internal cloud to offer services to external customers.
Recently, John had the chance to participate in a new Cloud Insights Video Podcast to discuss the challenges his team faced prior to cloud implementation. Like most IT teams, they were challenged by speed of delivery of business capabilities, driving Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) down and completing maintenance on the underlying infrastructure with minimal impact on the business users or applications they need on a daily basis.
To offset these challenges, his team developed and deployed CITEIS (Cisco IT Elastic Infrastructure Services), an internal, private, infrastructure-as-a-service cloud. CITEIS started off as a way to provision virtual machines, but the team quickly realized that it wasn’t enough so they added on more middleware and database capabilities . Now, it’s a rich service that John’s team offers to their clients.
Through this process, Cisco has achieved many benefits of cloud. To IT and business leaders looking to build a cloud, John offers these three considerations:
1) Focus on the end user experience. Improving the end-user experience is one of the most significant improvements we made through the implementation of CITEIS.
2) Identify ways to reduce TCO . Building a cloud gives you the ability to reduce TCO. For example, Cisco has driven down otheir TCO by about 60%.
3) Use the cloud for application workload mobility and flexibility. Cloud provides the ability to move the workload around the data center, which is important now and will become even more important in the future.
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Additional Resources:
Watch the Cisco Intercloud Workload Migration Webcast (available on demand)
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