© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Get Started Transforming your data center from a cost center to a business enabler requires a holistic approach. There are ten domains in the data center you must consider in order to achieve successful transformation. Cisco Domain Ten SM is a framework that reveals these essential domains. It can help you identify gaps and create an architectural roadmap for: • Consolidation and Virtualization • Cloud • Applications • Desktop Virtualization Understanding the Cisco Domain Ten framework allows you to accelerate the transformation of your data center, regardless of whether you want to take advantage of virtualization, move to a cloud-based IT model, or operate your data center more efficiently and agilely. Begin your journey by clicking on any domain to your left or the quick links above.
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© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Get StartedTransforming your data center from a cost center to a business enabler requires a holistic approach. There are ten domains in the data center you must consider in order to achieve successful transformation. Cisco Domain TenSM is a framework that reveals these essential domains. It can help you identify gaps and create an architectural roadmap for:
• Consolidation and Virtualization• Cloud • Applications • Desktop Virtualization
Understanding the Cisco Domain Ten framework allows you to accelerate thetransformation of your data center, regardless of whether you want to take advantage of virtualization, move to a cloud-based IT model, or operate your data center more efficiently and agilely.
Begin your journey by clicking on any domain to your left or the quick links above.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Facilities and Infrastructure
Every data center begins at the physical resource domain, what Cisco refers to as Facilities and Infrastructure. This domain includes active computing, storage, and networking resources and supporting facilities, such as power and cooling equip-ment. These elements are common to all data centers and must be part of any environmental, management, and implementation considerations.
BEST PRACTICE
Standardize infrastructure to simplify virtualization, automation, and ongoing operations.
Successful transformation of the data center infrastructure requires coop-eration among server, network, and storage assets; these capabilities are available with the Cisco Unified Computing System™ platform. Resources that are highly standardized and treated as a resource pool, unlike resources in traditional servers, storage, and network silos, allow dynamic provisioning. Hardware and servers can be made completely transparent to the OS and the applications that run on them. This “stateless computing” allows the OS and applications to move from one server to another.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Facilities and Infrastructure
Customers are adopting next-generation infrastructure two to three times faster than they had planned; therefore, when designing infrastructure, it is important to plan for future growth and retirement of old assets.
When infrastructure is designed to function as an efficient system, it helps:
• Simplify operations and lower costs
• Provide a stable, secure, and cost-efficient foundation to deliver highly available applications
• Reduce complexity of virtualization and automation
• Transition from legacy systems to a modern architecture that is agile, cost- effective, and scalable
• Tame the sprawl of active resources, unstructured data, application and web servers, and virtual machines
• Enable “plug-and-play” capacity
Bringing together all the elements in the data center is the first step toward a simple operation model that enables IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS).
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Facilities and Infrastructure
Cisco provides a complete architecture platform designed specifically to supportvirtualization in the data center. Cisco Unified Data Center changes the economicsof the data center by unifying compute, storage, networking, virtualization, andmanagement into a single platform. This is designed to increase operating effi-ciencies, simplify operations, and provide business agility—essential for deployingIT as a service and cloud computing.
Computing: Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS®) anchors the data center architec-ture with a highly scalable system-level computing solution that integrates com-puting, access network, and storage network resources. The UCS platform uses integrated, model-based management to simplify and speed deployment of virtu-alized environments, bringing the network directly to server and virtual machines for increased performance, security, and manageability.
Network: Cisco Unified Fabric delivers high-performance data and storage networking to simplify deployment, help ensure quality of experience, and reduce operating costs. Cisco’s integrated network services provide high-speed connectivity and high availability, increase application performance, and reduce security risks in multitenant environments.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Facilities and Infrastructure
Storage: Multiprotocol storage networks start with the reliable performance and rich, ma-ture functionality of Fiber Channel SANs that extend seamlessly into the ethernet realm, resulting in a single network with the flexibility to deploy both protocols at any point in the path between server and storage. Cisco has developed integrated systems with partners such as EMC, VMware, Hitachi Data Systems, and NetApp, which feature Cisco UCS, Unified Fabric, and partner storage. The result is a standardized infrastructure and the foundation to rapidly deliver data center applications, virtualized desktops, and cloud computing services.
Case Studies:
Melbourne Water Reduces Data Center Energy Consumption By 40 Percent
Elon University Grows Capacity with New Data Center Platform
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Virtualization and Abstraction
The combination of Virtualization and Abstraction makes cloud computing possible. Virtualization is one of the biggest trends in IT, and for good reason. Virtualization solutions such as VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, and Red Hat offer separate computing functions from physical hardware and allow users to easily share resources. Virtualization enables IT to provide services that scale seamlessly across a standardized infrastructure. Server virtualization allows applications to run in separate, isolated partitions—or virtual machines— within a single server and enables workloads to be moved as necessary, providing significant benefits.
BEST PRACTICE
Expand virtualization across computing, storage, and networking resources. Design virtualized environments to support bare-metal and virtual provisioning.
At present, a number of workloads still cannot be run in a virtual environ-ment for a variety of reasons. Infrastructure must be thoughtfully designed to allow bare-metal provisioning while still providing the enhanced benefits of virtualization.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Virtualization and Abstraction
Virtualization fundamentally changes the way that IT managers think about com-puting resources. They no longer have to manage individual servers and instead can concentrate on the services that the technology can provide. Server virtual-ization is propelling storage and network virtualization, which is also referred to as abstraction. Storage virtualization integrates physical storage from multiple network storage devices so that they appear as one device. Network virtualiza-tion combines available network resources and treats all servers and services as a single pool of resources that can be redeployed in real time to meet user demand.
Abstraction hides the complexity from the user and presents a single, high-level, and simplified concept of a data center’s hardware, network, infrastructure, and storage resources as a single fabric. By hiding unnecessary details about resourc-es, abstraction allows IT managers to focus on the applications and services that they want to deploy.
A unified platform that delivers rapid deployment through automated configuration will simplify architecture and reduce costs. Virtualization must be built into thenetwork, allowing administrators to manage virtual machines and physical servers the same way, providing massive scalability along with uncompromised security,visibility, and control.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Virtualization and Abstraction
Cisco Nexus 1000V switches simplify and scale virtual networking. By adding virtualization intelligence to your data center, you get highly secure, multitenant services.
Cisco recommends a phased virtualization roadmap that makes financial sense and also addresses IT concerns. Organizations can accelerate the adoption of a virtualization solution and lay the foundation to securely manage policy changesand compliance concerns across the server, network, voice, video, and storage components.
Virtualization is one of the biggest differences between a traditional data center and a cloud data center, offering increased performance, consolidation ratios, and scalability while lowering the total cost of ownership. It also lays the groundwork for a service-oriented infrastructure and is an important first step to moving a data center toward automation and orchestration.
Information about desktop virtualization can be found in domain 8.
Case study:
Tatts Group Drives Positive Change Through Consolidation and Virtualization
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Automation and Orchestration
The Automation and Orchestration domain is based on management automation software. This software enables IT organizations to automate and orchestrate what goes on within the virtualization domain sitting on top of the standard infrastructure.
This domain can streamline repetitive data center processes - such as applica-tion and server OS deployment - and drastically reduce provisioning time for new services.
BEST PRACTICE
Automate an entire process including IT and business operations. Understanding and incorporating all interdependencies increases automation success.
For example, consider an organization that is automating the provisioning of new server resources. If the IT team automates only the IT part of the task, they may have to pause and get manual approval to assign IP addresses. They may also have to get manual approval to allocate resources, which can slow down the process.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Automation and Orchestration
Automation, which replaces manual actions with software executables and scripts, has been widely used by IT professionals for many years. An organization spends time and resources building servers, configuring storage arrays, making network changes, and performing countless other repetitive and expensive tasks. Auto-mation eliminates the need for such tasks to be performed manually, and it com-pletes them with greater accuracy.
Orchestration links a variety of automated tasks together to provision a new service. It is performed using a set of tools and workflow templates that integrate multiple discrete tasks and management actions by providing a software-based workflow using standard interfaces.
Together, automation and orchestration enable organizations to realize the full efficiency benefits promised by new IT models.
This domain lays the foundation for two areas: a self-service user portal and workload automation.
Case studies:
Cisco Services Helps Lower TCO for Cisco IT
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
User Portal
The User Portal defines the user experience and is the domain in which we work, live, and play. Users can order what they need from a menu of standard options using an intuitive portal interface (for example, Amazon.com). The user portal has two main components: the software tool, which provides the functions, and the governance model, which enables the tool. Management can control and track each service from initial request to decommissioning. IT can enable self-service provisioning of application and infrastructure requests within minutes instead of weeks.
BEST PRACTICE
Determine the scope of the user portal, including current and future needs. Will it be used only for IT infrastructure tasks? Will it offer new applications? Or will it enable access to other functional assets such as marketing campaigns?
It is also critical to determine who can access the user portal, what limita-tions are placed on what each user can see, and how sophisticated the user portal will be.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
User Portal
Figure 1: Example of a user portal interface
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
User Portal
It is important to thoughtfully consider the usability of the portal; together withdomains 5 and 6, the user portal supports consistent ordering and delivery pro-cesses through automation and IT policy enforcement. Creating a single interface that interacts with the complex computing systems empower users to order what they want and are authorized to order.
Learn about Cisco Cloud Portal. It helps IT organizations:
• Encourage adoption of standardized options with a menu in an online catalog
• Deploy an internal private cloud and govern public cloud usage with a self-ser-vice portal
• Manage the lifecycle of services and monitor consumption for pay-per-use tracking
• Improve visibility into demand to help ensure more accurate capacity planning
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Service Catalog and Management
The Service Catalog and Management domain is closely linked with the user portal Domain. When an end user accesses the user portal, the user sees a menu of services that can be ordered. The menu is based on a catalog of services. The service catalog is a software tool that IT uses to define and manage lists of order-able IT services.
BEST PRACTICE
Determine at the start what is needed in the catalog and how extensive the offers need to be. It is important to develop a service catalog that meets the needs of the end user by considering:
• Who can access the user portal • What should be in the service catalog • How many services should be in the service catalog • How to help ensure the manageability of the portal content
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Service Catalog and Management
Cisco helps customers address these considerations and design the user portal and orchestration workflows.
Service catalog and management (service lifecycle) capabilities are often inte-grated and available with the user portal to provide service-level agreement (SLA) management policies, procedures, and service assurance for requestable servic-es. In this domain the offer is defined as well as the level of reliance, and the level of location-specific development.
Some customers may want only a limited choice of services while other custom-ers may want more. The more standardized the service catalog is, the greater the operational efficiency and the lower the cost per unit. Standardization of the user portal enables consistent ordering and delivery processes through automation and IT policy enforcement.
Living behind the catalog is software containing all the logic needed to manage the catalog. This gives IT the capability to define and maintain catalogs - such as updates and adding services - assign services to specific user roles so that portal users only see those services they are authorized for, and connect services to the automated tasks associated with specific services.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Service Catalog and Management
Cisco Unified Management helps organizations automate and manage their IT infrastructure and services to meet the needs of the business. It features automa-tion, orchestration, and lifecycle management to simplify deployment and opera-tion of physical or bare-metal, virtual, and cloud infrastructure. Cisco helps IT departments develop a self-service portal and service catalog to quickly deliver on-demand IT services to support business initiatives.
Case studies: Puleng Technologies Helps Sasol Save Time, Reduce Costs, and Increase User Satisfaction With Self-service Catalog
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Service Financial Management
The Service Financial Management Domain allows organizations to set up and track usage-based billing. This tracking and billing capability is sometimes re-ferred to as chargeback, showback, or usage tracking. This capability essentially allows users to pay for only those services that they use. With chargeback, IT can justify the value of consumed services to the organization and understand the impact of consumption on costs. For example, consider electricity: consumers pay only for power that is consumed. The cloud works the same way. It offers a system of financial controls that auditors favor because it allows organizations to easily see and understand the effects of consumption on business decisions.
BEST PRACTICE
Cloud computing enables utility-based billing. IT pricing models can be structured to cover costs or to convert IT services into profit centers. IT professionals can determine which approach is right for their organizations.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): Domains 1 through 6 provide the foundation for a true private cloud that offers IaaS. The infrastructure is provided to an end user as a service according to what that user orders through the portal and service catalog.
As shown in figure 2, an IaaS offering contains the essential characteristics of cloud computing as defined by ISACA:
figure 2
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Service Financial Management
Cisco offers the Unified Data Center platform that unifies networking, compute, storage and management into a common fabric-based architecture designed to deliver business agility, IT simplicity and financial flexibility.
This platform is designed specifically to enable on-demand provisioning from shared pools of infrastructure resource across physical and virtual environments. The Cisco Unified Data Center, combined with our professional and technical ser-vices, help IT organizations transform their legacy operations to IT-as-a-Service. Services from Cisco and our partners help you plan, build, and manage your desired data center or cloud solution.
Case Study:
SunGard Introduces High-Availability Private Cloud Service
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Platform
The Platform Domain provides an environment for developers. What sets the plat-form apart from other domains is the platform combines commercially available software elements on top of the infrastructure. Software includes OS, middleware and database applications.
BEST PRACTICE
Reduce the number of OS images supported to simplify management and deployment of a cloud platform.
Many organizations have one unique OS image per server. However, IT departments have learned as they move toward automation that a better approach is to use a small number of standardized OS images that can apply to multiple servers, to standardize automation. For example, a tradi-tional guideline is the use of one system administrator for every 25 servers. A best practice is to have one administrator for every 100 servers. With standardization, organizations can move to one administrator for every 2,500 servers, greatly reducing the number of staff members devoted to system administration and allowing members to focus on other activities.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Platform
The platform includes the provisioning of these software elements through the user portal, providing the platform-as-a-service (PaaS). For instance, with PaaS, clients can offer database-as-a-service capabilities with the database administra-tor (DBA) able to enter through the user portal to provision the database.
To be effective in this domain, clients must be able to justify the number of OS, middleware, and database versions they are supporting. Each variation in platform components adds complexity to the overall system, so decisions about the plat-form layer need to be made with care.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Applications
The applications that are physically located and run on the cloud infrastructure are commonly referred to as software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings. Just like the software in the platform domain, the applications in domain 8 need to be prepared before they can be provisioned in the cloud. Before migrating to the cloud, you need to determine whether your applications are compatible with a cloud environ-ment. Many existing applications were not developed to take advantage of cloud infrastructure, and as a result they will not run well in a cloud infrastructure.
Cisco can help determine how the application stack should look. We can help identify which applications are well suited for the cloud, which will work with some remediation and which are inappropriate for cloud deployment. Cisco can help enterprises understand the scale of their cloud environment and the size of the infrastructure needed and then migrate the applications to the cloud infrastructure.
BEST PRACTICE
Determine the application strategy by considering where the applica-tions will reside, the suitability of applications for the target environment, and potential application modernization.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Business Applications
When migrating or deploying business applications such as those from Oracle, Microsoft, or SAP, organizations must address the application environment. They need to:
• Migrate applications to a computing platform that helps reduce costs and increase business agility
• Decide which applications to virtualize and modernize
• Decide which operating systems to standardize
• Identify the core business-critical applications and their dependencies
• Determine application data location and proximity for low-latency user experiences
• Profile applications for capacity and reliability
• Understand the complex interdependencies of the network, storage, computing, and server layers and how they affect application layout
• Assess the effects on disaster recovery plans
• Simplify application management
• Automate provisioning
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Business Applications
All these tasks require the organization to take a strategic approach to align busi-ness goals with the target application environment.
Case study:
Avago Technologies Accelerate Business Cycle Times
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Desktop Virtualization
End users are moving towards a world of greater workplace mobility by bringing their own devices to work. The need for access to corporate applications and data at anytime, from anywhere, and on any device is increasing daily. Desktop virtu-alization technologies, which replace the traditional desktop environment with a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to meet the demand for secure mobile access, delivers these capabilities and when provided through the cloud, are combined with the ubiquitous access, elasticity, and measured service that distinguish cloud computing and make delivering these services both viable and practical. Desktop virtualization may also include application, virtual desktop, and remote services. It decouples application execution from where the client physically resides, allowing new client computing paradigms.
BEST PRACTICE
Avoid the initial capital costs associated with deployment of a virtual desktop solution. Explore cloud based “as-a-service” options. In ad-dition, inquire about storage and network optimization approaches and technologies to reduce storage and bandwidth requirements and improve performance.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Desktop Virtualization
Benefits of desktop virtualization include: simplified desktop and application man-agement; reduced operational costs; secured company data; and the foundation for a rich user experience.
Cisco Desktop Virtualization Services deliver rich, expert-based services end to end that can help you rapidly plan, build, and manage a desktop virtualization solution of your choice. These services also help provide the right fit with your existing investments and align your IT and business strategies. Transitioning to desktop virtualization requires alignment across numerous technologies and IT departments. This change can be a time-consuming effort, often requiring spe-cific skills across multiple technology domains that are not readily available in most IT departments. Cisco Desktop Virtualization Services can streamline this transfor-mation with expert-based services that can help you rapidly achieve the desktop virtualization solution of your choice anywhere, with any device, over any medium.
Case Studies:
Seattle University Regains Control of Desktop Applications
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Collaboration Applications
Cloud environments provide a new level of flexibility in application and data deliv-ery. Applications and services that are provisioned from a cloud provide operation benefits without the capital expenses of on-premises environments. As direct consumers of cloud-hosted applications and services from Cisco and our part-ners, end users get access to high-performance, enterprise-class applications and services.
Learn more about Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solutions.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Application Modernization
Besides migrating applications to a more efficient infrastructure, there are two other ways to improve application management: workload automation and appli-cation modernization.
Workload automation includes automation of common tasks such as running scheduled batch workloads and event-based business processes, as well as determining where and when to run them, without the need to manage scripts or customize existing tools. Workload automation can be used for a wide variety of business processes and helps simplify operations, reduce costs, and promote business flexibility.
Application modernization involves migrating custom applications to a more efficient infrastructure and transforming them into stateless applications that can dynamically respond to changing business requirements. For example, if a state-less application is hosted in the United States but is needed in Australia, it can be run in Australia, and all the local security policies will be respected. Performance will be better because the application does not have to be run over the WAN.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Security and Compliance
Chief Information Officers (CIOs) frequently cite security concerns and compli-ance requirements as two of their biggest challenges. These challenges arise from the way that organizations consume IT services today, led by cloud com-puting and expanded outsourcing. How to maintain the security of shared infra-structure consistently tops IT professionals’ list of cloud concerns and may be the main reason that some CIOs have been slow to adopt cloud computing. CIOs are also facing compliance issues that did not exist a few years ago: Sarbanes-Oxley, increased government scrutiny, and foreign regulations.
BEST PRACTICE
Address security and compliance risks posed by the lack of physical boundaries by building security into the IT architecture. Since the network connects everything, defining security in the network is essential.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Security and Compliance
The security and compliance domain helps IT departments make the transition to cloud computing—whether to a public, private, or hybrid cloud—while maintaining security and meeting compliance objectives. Organizations must document secu-rity and compliance requirements and provide an assessment of current vulner-abilities and deviations from security best practices. As organizations develop a cloud architecture, they must be sure to include experts who understand how to incorporate security and compliance safeguards into complex data center and cloud environments.
Enterprises look to segmentation to manage and organize data in the data center. Each segmented area must be protected and have consistent security controls that span both the physical network and the cloud to deter external and internal threats.
As shown in figure 3, the top three data center security care-abouts are:
• Segmentation: Enforce consistent policies across physical and virtual boundaries to protect data at rest and in motion.
• Threat defense: Protect businesses from external and internal threats.
• Visibility: Maintain compliance and provide insight into data center operations.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Security and Compliancefigure 3
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Security and Compliance
Data centers are not protected in a physical sense, and approaches to secu-rity are changing dramatically. Security and compliance postures will continue to evolve as these new infrastructures and services are deployed. Clients must continuously evaluate and review security policies as new services and capabili-ties are launched.
Whether your challenge is securely connecting multi-site, multi-tenant physical and virtual environments, providing secure access to business applications and data from any device, protecting information and privacy, or enabling secure col-laboration anywhere, Cisco Services can help you plan, build, and manage perva-sive security across the data center infrastructure and within and between clouds to protect your business.
Case Studies:
Ecobank Cuts Costs and Improves Time to Market While Ensuring Compliance with International Standards California Department of Water Resources Collaborates Securely with Outside Organizations
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Process and Governance
The process and governance domain affects the entire data center. Aligning pro-cesses with business objectives enables a business to be more efficient, reduces costs, and improves customer satisfaction. Governance also works to monitor and document both the successes and shortcomings of an organization. Success-fully implemented business processes span the entire organization transparently in both the data center and the cloud environment. IT and corporate governance must also adhere to and enforce processes that define the way that the cloud is used and managed. Redesigning the processes to take advantage of automation and the standardized infrastructure can also help organizations achieve full finan-cial benefits.
BEST PRACTICE
Redesign processes to reduce the need for human intervention, and update the existing compliance and policy framework to meet regulatory and industry compliance requirements.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Process and Governance
As part of a plan for lifecycle management of virtualized environments, the com-pute, network, and storage domains of virtualized data centers must be managed, measured, operated, and planned together as one holistic environment that meets the unique requirements of the business. Processes and tools that do not ad-equately support virtualized environments must be identified, evaluated, changed, or enhanced based on best practices.
As shown in figure 4, new IT models require a different operations approach to resolve issues across a converged virtualized infrastructure. Tools, policy, and process changes are needed to:
• Accelerate the provisioning and deprovisioning process• Adjust to the elasticity of virtualized data center services• Assure SLA commitments• Deliver services that are no longer tightly coupled to the hardware
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Process and Governance
figure 4: Click image to activate demo
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Process and Governance
Build a high level of security into your architecture from the start to set a higher compliance and security threshold. Cisco can help you understand where you need highly standardized processes, where you need to be highly flexible, and what your unique requirements are. Cisco delivers solutions appropriate to your organization’s compliance and policy framework to help meet global requirements by incorporating everything into existing policies and procedures.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Putting It All Together
Setting the Foundation for Data Center Transformation
The Cisco Domain Ten framework defines the factors you need to consider to achieve successful data center transformation.
Cisco helps:
• Align IT strategy with business goals• Improve operation efficiency and reduce costs• Enhance application performance and availability• Create an agile and resilient foundation for your business• Enable new business models
Together with our partners, Cisco brings people, processes, and technologies to accelerate the transformation of your data center. Realize the full value of your data center investment faster and successfully transform, optimize and secure your data center.
Learn more about services from Cisco and our partners. Overview of Cisco Services Cisco Cloud Enablement ServicesCisco Virtualization ServicesCisco Desktop Virtualization Services
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
CloudWelcome to the Cloud quick link.
Continue your journey by clicking on any highlighted domain to your left, starting with domain 1. These domains are the ones most relevant to the Cloud.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Facilities and Infrastructure
Every data center begins at the physical resource domain, what Cisco refers to as Facilities and Infrastructure. This domain includes active computing, storage, and networking resources and supporting facilities, such as power and cooling equip-ment. These elements are common to all data centers and must be part of any environmental, management, and implementation considerations.
BEST PRACTICE
Standardize infrastructure to simplify virtualization, automation, and ongoing operations.
Successful transformation of the data center infrastructure requires coop-eration among server, network, and storage assets; these capabilities are available with the Cisco Unified Computing System™ platform. Resources that are highly standardized and treated as a resource pool, unlike resources in traditional servers, storage, and network silos, allow dynamic provisioning. Hardware and servers can be made completely transparent to the OS and the applications that run on them. This “stateless computing” allows the OS and applications to move from one server to another.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Facilities and Infrastructure
Customers are adopting next-generation infrastructure two to three times faster than they had planned; therefore, when designing infrastructure, it is important to plan for future growth and retirement of old assets.
When infrastructure is designed to function as an efficient system, it helps:
• Simplify operations and lower costs
• Provide a stable, secure, and cost-efficient foundation to deliver highly available applications
• Reduce complexity of virtualization and automation
• Transition from legacy systems to a modern architecture that is agile, cost- effective, and scalable
• Tame the sprawl of active resources, unstructured data, application and web servers, and virtual machines
• Enable “plug-and-play” capacity
Bringing together all the elements in the data center is the first step toward a simple operation model that enables IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS).
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Facilities and Infrastructure
Cisco provides a complete architecture platform designed specifically to supportvirtualization in the data center. Cisco Unified Data Center changes the economicsof the data center by unifying compute, storage, networking, virtualization, andmanagement into a single platform. This is designed to increase operating effi-ciencies, simplify operations, and provide business agility—essential for deployingIT as a service and cloud computing.
Computing: Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS®) anchors the data center architec-ture with a highly scalable system-level computing solution that integrates com-puting, access network, and storage network resources. The UCS platform uses integrated, model-based management to simplify and speed deployment of virtu-alized environments, bringing the network directly to server and virtual machines for increased performance, security, and manageability.
Network: Cisco Unified Fabric delivers high-performance data and storage networking to simplify deployment, help ensure quality of experience, and reduce operating costs. Cisco’s integrated network services provide high-speed connectivity and high availability, increase application performance, and reduce security risks in multitenant environments.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Facilities and Infrastructure
Storage: Multiprotocol storage networks start with the reliable performance and rich, ma-ture functionality of Fiber Channel SANs that extend seamlessly into the ethernet realm, resulting in a single network with the flexibility to deploy both protocols at any point in the path between server and storage. Cisco has developed integrated systems with partners such as EMC, VMware, Hitachi Data Systems, and NetApp, which feature Cisco UCS, Unified Fabric, and partner storage. The result is a standardized infrastructure and the foundation to rapidly deliver data center applications, virtualized desktops, and cloud computing services.
Case Studies:
Melbourne Water Reduces Data Center Energy Consumption By 40 Percent
Elon University Grows Capacity with New Data Center Platform
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Virtualization and Abstraction
The combination of Virtualization and Abstraction makes cloud computing possible. Virtualization is one of the biggest trends in IT, and for good reason. Virtualization solutions such as VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, and Red Hat offer separate computing functions from physical hardware and allow users to easily share resources. Virtualization enables IT to provide services that scale seamlessly across a standardized infrastructure. Server virtualization allows applications to run in separate, isolated partitions—or virtual machines— within a single server and enables workloads to be moved as necessary, providing significant benefits.
BEST PRACTICE
Expand virtualization across computing, storage, and networking resources. Design virtualized environments to support bare-metal and virtual provisioning.
At present, a number of workloads still cannot be run in a virtual environ-ment for a variety of reasons. Infrastructure must be thoughtfully designed to allow bare-metal provisioning while still providing the enhanced benefits of virtualization.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Virtualization and Abstraction
Virtualization fundamentally changes the way that IT managers think about com-puting resources. They no longer have to manage individual servers and instead can concentrate on the services that the technology can provide. Server virtual-ization is propelling storage and network virtualization, which is also referred to as abstraction. Storage virtualization integrates physical storage from multiple network storage devices so that they appear as one device. Network virtualiza-tion combines available network resources and treats all servers and services as a single pool of resources that can be redeployed in real time to meet user demand.
Abstraction hides the complexity from the user and presents a single, high-level, and simplified concept of a data center’s hardware, network, infrastructure, and storage resources as a single fabric. By hiding unnecessary details about resourc-es, abstraction allows IT managers to focus on the applications and services that they want to deploy.
A unified platform that delivers rapid deployment through automated configuration will simplify architecture and reduce costs. Virtualization must be built into thenetwork, allowing administrators to manage virtual machines and physical servers the same way, providing massive scalability along with uncompromised security,visibility, and control.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Virtualization and Abstraction
Cisco Nexus 1000V switches simplify and scale virtual networking. By adding virtualization intelligence to your data center, you get highly secure, multitenant services.
Cisco recommends a phased virtualization roadmap that makes financial sense and also addresses IT concerns. Organizations can accelerate the adoption of a virtualization solution and lay the foundation to securely manage policy changesand compliance concerns across the server, network, voice, video, and storage components.
Virtualization is one of the biggest differences between a traditional data center and a cloud data center, offering increased performance, consolidation ratios, and scalability while lowering the total cost of ownership. It also lays the groundwork for a service-oriented infrastructure and is an important first step to moving a data center toward automation and orchestration.
Information about desktop virtualization can be found in domain 8.
Case study:
Tatts Group Drives Positive Change Through Consolidation and Virtualization
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Automation and Orchestration
The Automation and Orchestration domain is based on management automation software. This software enables IT organizations to automate and orchestrate what goes on within the virtualization domain sitting on top of the standard infrastructure.
This domain can streamline repetitive data center processes - such as applica-tion and server OS deployment - and drastically reduce provisioning time for new services.
BEST PRACTICE
Automate an entire process including IT and business operations. Understanding and incorporating all interdependencies increases automation success.
For example, consider an organization that is automating the provisioning of new server resources. If the IT team automates only the IT part of the task, they may have to pause and get manual approval to assign IP addresses. They may also have to get manual approval to allocate resources, which can slow down the process.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Automation and Orchestration
Automation, which replaces manual actions with software executables and scripts, has been widely used by IT professionals for many years. An organization spends time and resources building servers, configuring storage arrays, making network changes, and performing countless other repetitive and expensive tasks. Auto-mation eliminates the need for such tasks to be performed manually, and it com-pletes them with greater accuracy.
Orchestration links a variety of automated tasks together to provision a new service. It is performed using a set of tools and workflow templates that integrate multiple discrete tasks and management actions by providing a software-based workflow using standard interfaces.
Together, automation and orchestration enable organizations to realize the full efficiency benefits promised by new IT models.
This domain lays the foundation for two areas: a self-service user portal and workload automation.
Case studies:
Cisco Services Helps Lower TCO for Cisco IT
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
User Portal
The User Portal defines the user experience and is the domain in which we work, live, and play. Users can order what they need from a menu of standard options using an intuitive portal interface (for example, Amazon.com). The user portal has two main components: the software tool, which provides the functions, and the governance model, which enables the tool. Management can control and track each service from initial request to decommissioning. IT can enable self-service provisioning of application and infrastructure requests within minutes instead of weeks.
BEST PRACTICE
Determine the scope of the user portal, including current and future needs. Will it be used only for IT infrastructure tasks? Will it offer new applications? Or will it enable access to other functional assets such as marketing campaigns?
It is also critical to determine who can access the user portal, what limita-tions are placed on what each user can see, and how sophisticated the user portal will be.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
User Portal
Figure 1: Example of a user portal interface
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
User Portal
It is important to thoughtfully consider the usability of the portal; together withdomains 5 and 6, the user portal supports consistent ordering and delivery pro-cesses through automation and IT policy enforcement. Creating a single interface that interacts with the complex computing systems empower users to order what they want and are authorized to order.
Learn about Cisco Cloud Portal. It helps IT organizations:
• Encourage adoption of standardized options with a menu in an online catalog
• Deploy an internal private cloud and govern public cloud usage with a self-ser-vice portal
• Manage the lifecycle of services and monitor consumption for pay-per-use tracking
• Improve visibility into demand to help ensure more accurate capacity planning
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Service Catalog and Management
The Service Catalog and Management domain is closely linked with the user portal Domain. When an end user accesses the user portal, the user sees a menu of services that can be ordered. The menu is based on a catalog of services. The service catalog is a software tool that IT uses to define and manage lists of order-able IT services.
BEST PRACTICE
Determine at the start what is needed in the catalog and how extensive the offers need to be. It is important to develop a service catalog that meets the needs of the end user by considering:
• Who can access the user portal • What should be in the service catalog • How many services should be in the service catalog • How to help ensure the manageability of the portal content
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Service Catalog and Management
Cisco helps customers address these considerations and design the user portal and orchestration workflows.
Service catalog and management (service lifecycle) capabilities are often inte-grated and available with the user portal to provide service-level agreement (SLA) management policies, procedures, and service assurance for requestable servic-es. In this domain the offer is defined as well as the level of reliance, and the level of location-specific development.
Some customers may want only a limited choice of services while other custom-ers may want more. The more standardized the service catalog is, the greater the operational efficiency and the lower the cost per unit. Standardization of the user portal enables consistent ordering and delivery processes through automation and IT policy enforcement.
Living behind the catalog is software containing all the logic needed to manage the catalog. This gives IT the capability to define and maintain catalogs - such as updates and adding services - assign services to specific user roles so that portal users only see those services they are authorized for, and connect services to the automated tasks associated with specific services.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Service Catalog and Management
Cisco Unified Management helps organizations automate and manage their IT infrastructure and services to meet the needs of the business. It features automa-tion, orchestration, and lifecycle management to simplify deployment and opera-tion of physical or bare-metal, virtual, and cloud infrastructure. Cisco helps IT departments develop a self-service portal and service catalog to quickly deliver on-demand IT services to support business initiatives.
Case studies: Puleng Technologies Helps Sasol Save Time, Reduce Costs, and Increase User Satisfaction With Self-service Catalog
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Service Financial Management
The Service Financial Management Domain allows organizations to set up and track usage-based billing. This tracking and billing capability is sometimes re-ferred to as chargeback, showback, or usage tracking. This capability essentially allows users to pay for only those services that they use. With chargeback, IT can justify the value of consumed services to the organization and understand the impact of consumption on costs. For example, consider electricity: consumers pay only for power that is consumed. The cloud works the same way. It offers a system of financial controls that auditors favor because it allows organizations to easily see and understand the effects of consumption on business decisions.
BEST PRACTICE
Cloud computing enables utility-based billing. IT pricing models can be structured to cover costs or to convert IT services into profit centers. IT professionals can determine which approach is right for their organizations.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): Domains 1 through 6 provide the foundation for a true private cloud that offers IaaS. The infrastructure is provided to an end user as a service according to what that user orders through the portal and service catalog.
As shown in figure 2, an IaaS offering contains the essential characteristics of cloud computing as defined by ISACA:
figure 2
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Service Financial Management
Cisco offers the Unified Data Center platform that unifies networking, compute, storage and management into a common fabric-based architecture designed to deliver business agility, IT simplicity and financial flexibility.
This platform is designed specifically to enable on-demand provisioning from shared pools of infrastructure resource across physical and virtual environments. The Cisco Unified Data Center, combined with our professional and technical ser-vices, help IT organizations transform their legacy operations to IT-as-a-Service. Services from Cisco and our partners help you plan, build, and manage your desired data center or cloud solution.
Case Study:
SunGard Introduces High-Availability Private Cloud Service
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Platform
The Platform Domain provides an environment for developers. What sets the plat-form apart from other domains is the platform combines commercially available software elements on top of the infrastructure. Software includes OS, middleware and database applications.
BEST PRACTICE
Reduce the number of OS images supported to simplify management and deployment of a cloud platform.
Many organizations have one unique OS image per server. However, IT departments have learned as they move toward automation that a better approach is to use a small number of standardized OS images that can apply to multiple servers, to standardize automation. For example, a tradi-tional guideline is the use of one system administrator for every 25 servers. A best practice is to have one administrator for every 100 servers. With standardization, organizations can move to one administrator for every 2,500 servers, greatly reducing the number of staff members devoted to system administration and allowing members to focus on other activities.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Platform
The platform includes the provisioning of these software elements through the user portal, providing the platform-as-a-service (PaaS). For instance, with PaaS, clients can offer database-as-a-service capabilities with the database administra-tor (DBA) able to enter through the user portal to provision the database.
To be effective in this domain, clients must be able to justify the number of OS, middleware, and database versions they are supporting. Each variation in platform components adds complexity to the overall system, so decisions about the plat-form layer need to be made with care.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Applications
The applications that are physically located and run on the cloud infrastructure are commonly referred to as software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings. Just like the software in the platform domain, the applications in domain 8 need to be prepared before they can be provisioned in the cloud. Before migrating to the cloud, you need to determine whether your applications are compatible with a cloud environ-ment. Many existing applications were not developed to take advantage of cloud infrastructure, and as a result they will not run well in a cloud infrastructure.
Cisco can help determine how the application stack should look. We can help identify which applications are well suited for the cloud, which will work with some remediation and which are inappropriate for cloud deployment. Cisco can help enterprises understand the scale of their cloud environment and the size of the infrastructure needed and then migrate the applications to the cloud infrastructure.
BEST PRACTICE
Determine the application strategy by considering where the applica-tions will reside, the suitability of applications for the target environment, and potential application modernization.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Business Applications
When migrating or deploying business applications such as those from Oracle, Microsoft, or SAP, organizations must address the application environment. They need to:
• Migrate applications to a computing platform that helps reduce costs and increase business agility
• Decide which applications to virtualize and modernize
• Decide which operating systems to standardize
• Identify the core business-critical applications and their dependencies
• Determine application data location and proximity for low-latency user experiences
• Profile applications for capacity and reliability
• Understand the complex interdependencies of the network, storage, computing, and server layers and how they affect application layout
• Assess the effects on disaster recovery plans
• Simplify application management
• Automate provisioning
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Business Applications
All these tasks require the organization to take a strategic approach to align busi-ness goals with the target application environment.
Case study:
Avago Technologies Accelerate Business Cycle Times
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Desktop Virtualization
End users are moving towards a world of greater workplace mobility by bringing their own devices to work. The need for access to corporate applications and data at anytime, from anywhere, and on any device is increasing daily. Desktop virtu-alization technologies, which replace the traditional desktop environment with a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to meet the demand for secure mobile access, delivers these capabilities and when provided through the cloud, are combined with the ubiquitous access, elasticity, and measured service that distinguish cloud computing and make delivering these services both viable and practical. Desktop virtualization may also include application, virtual desktop, and remote services. It decouples application execution from where the client physically resides, allowing new client computing paradigms.
BEST PRACTICE
Avoid the initial capital costs associated with deployment of a virtual desktop solution. Explore cloud based “as-a-service” options. In ad-dition, inquire about storage and network optimization approaches and technologies to reduce storage and bandwidth requirements and improve performance.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Desktop Virtualization
Benefits of desktop virtualization include: simplified desktop and application man-agement; reduced operational costs; secured company data; and the foundation for a rich user experience.
Cisco Desktop Virtualization Services deliver rich, expert-based services end to end that can help you rapidly plan, build, and manage a desktop virtualization solution of your choice. These services also help provide the right fit with your existing investments and align your IT and business strategies. Transitioning to desktop virtualization requires alignment across numerous technologies and IT departments. This change can be a time-consuming effort, often requiring spe-cific skills across multiple technology domains that are not readily available in most IT departments. Cisco Desktop Virtualization Services can streamline this transfor-mation with expert-based services that can help you rapidly achieve the desktop virtualization solution of your choice anywhere, with any device, over any medium.
Case Studies:
Seattle University Regains Control of Desktop Applications
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Collaboration Applications
Cloud environments provide a new level of flexibility in application and data deliv-ery. Applications and services that are provisioned from a cloud provide operation benefits without the capital expenses of on-premises environments. As direct consumers of cloud-hosted applications and services from Cisco and our part-ners, end users get access to high-performance, enterprise-class applications and services.
Learn more about Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solutions.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Application Modernization
Besides migrating applications to a more efficient infrastructure, there are two other ways to improve application management: workload automation and appli-cation modernization.
Workload automation includes automation of common tasks such as running scheduled batch workloads and event-based business processes, as well as determining where and when to run them, without the need to manage scripts or customize existing tools. Workload automation can be used for a wide variety of business processes and helps simplify operations, reduce costs, and promote business flexibility.
Application modernization involves migrating custom applications to a more efficient infrastructure and transforming them into stateless applications that can dynamically respond to changing business requirements. For example, if a state-less application is hosted in the United States but is needed in Australia, it can be run in Australia, and all the local security policies will be respected. Performance will be better because the application does not have to be run over the WAN.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Security and Compliance
Chief Information Officers (CIOs) frequently cite security concerns and compli-ance requirements as two of their biggest challenges. These challenges arise from the way that organizations consume IT services today, led by cloud com-puting and expanded outsourcing. How to maintain the security of shared infra-structure consistently tops IT professionals’ list of cloud concerns and may be the main reason that some CIOs have been slow to adopt cloud computing. CIOs are also facing compliance issues that did not exist a few years ago: Sarbanes-Oxley, increased government scrutiny, and foreign regulations.
BEST PRACTICE
Address security and compliance risks posed by the lack of physical boundaries by building security into the IT architecture. Since the network connects everything, defining security in the network is essential.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Security and Compliance
The security and compliance domain helps IT departments make the transition to cloud computing—whether to a public, private, or hybrid cloud—while maintaining security and meeting compliance objectives. Organizations must document secu-rity and compliance requirements and provide an assessment of current vulner-abilities and deviations from security best practices. As organizations develop a cloud architecture, they must be sure to include experts who understand how to incorporate security and compliance safeguards into complex data center and cloud environments.
Enterprises look to segmentation to manage and organize data in the data center. Each segmented area must be protected and have consistent security controls that span both the physical network and the cloud to deter external and internal threats.
As shown in figure 3, the top three data center security care-abouts are:
• Segmentation: Enforce consistent policies across physical and virtual boundaries to protect data at rest and in motion.
• Threat defense: Protect businesses from external and internal threats.
• Visibility: Maintain compliance and provide insight into data center operations.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Security and Compliancefigure 3
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Security and Compliance
Data centers are not protected in a physical sense, and approaches to secu-rity are changing dramatically. Security and compliance postures will continue to evolve as these new infrastructures and services are deployed. Clients must continuously evaluate and review security policies as new services and capabili-ties are launched.
Whether your challenge is securely connecting multi-site, multi-tenant physical and virtual environments, providing secure access to business applications and data from any device, protecting information and privacy, or enabling secure col-laboration anywhere, Cisco Services can help you plan, build, and manage perva-sive security across the data center infrastructure and within and between clouds to protect your business.
Case Studies:
Ecobank Cuts Costs and Improves Time to Market While Ensuring Compliance with International Standards California Department of Water Resources Collaborates Securely with Outside Organizations
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Process and Governance
The process and governance domain affects the entire data center. Aligning pro-cesses with business objectives enables a business to be more efficient, reduces costs, and improves customer satisfaction. Governance also works to monitor and document both the successes and shortcomings of an organization. Success-fully implemented business processes span the entire organization transparently in both the data center and the cloud environment. IT and corporate governance must also adhere to and enforce processes that define the way that the cloud is used and managed. Redesigning the processes to take advantage of automation and the standardized infrastructure can also help organizations achieve full finan-cial benefits.
BEST PRACTICE
Redesign processes to reduce the need for human intervention, and update the existing compliance and policy framework to meet regulatory and industry compliance requirements.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Process and Governance
As part of a plan for lifecycle management of virtualized environments, the com-pute, network, and storage domains of virtualized data centers must be managed, measured, operated, and planned together as one holistic environment that meets the unique requirements of the business. Processes and tools that do not ad-equately support virtualized environments must be identified, evaluated, changed, or enhanced based on best practices.
As shown in figure 4, new IT models require a different operations approach to resolve issues across a converged virtualized infrastructure. Tools, policy, and process changes are needed to:
• Accelerate the provisioning and deprovisioning process• Adjust to the elasticity of virtualized data center services• Assure SLA commitments• Deliver services that are no longer tightly coupled to the hardware
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Process and Governance
figure 4: Click image to activate demo
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Process and Governance
Build a high level of security into your architecture from the start to set a higher compliance and security threshold. Cisco can help you understand where you need highly standardized processes, where you need to be highly flexible, and what your unique requirements are. Cisco delivers solutions appropriate to your organization’s compliance and policy framework to help meet global requirements by incorporating everything into existing policies and procedures.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Putting It All Together
Gain strategic advantage, enhance business agility, and reduce costs.
The 10 domains make up the foundation of a true cloud environment and define the factors you need to consider to achieve successful business transformation. Depending on your needs, you may want to move to just infrastructure-as-a-service, or you may want to move to platform or software-as-a-service. Whatever your ultimate vision, the sequence for achieving it is important. To get SaaS, you need to start with IaaS, add on platform, and then add on the applications. There are many dependencies, and the sequence is critical. Another critical component of the foundation for your data center transformation is the capability to integrate this environment into the existing data center. You need to tie this new infrastruc-ture to existing tools that you already have.
Together with our partners, Cisco can help you determine the right cloud strategy and smooth the way to a successful deployment so that you can realize your busi-ness vision. We bring together people, processes, and technologies to accelerate your cloud solution and help ensure that your network and IT infrastructure are secure and optimized for the cloud.
Explore Cisco Cloud Enablement Services.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Consolidation/VirtualizationWelcome to the Consolidation/Virtualization quick link.
Continue your journey by clicking on any highlighted domain to your left, starting with domain 1. These domains are the ones most relevant to Consolidation/Virtu-alization.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Facilities and Infrastructure
Every data center begins at the physical resource domain, what Cisco refers to as Facilities and Infrastructure. This domain includes active computing, storage, and networking resources and supporting facilities, such as power and cooling equip-ment. These elements are common to all data centers and must be part of any environmental, management, and implementation considerations.
BEST PRACTICE
Standardize infrastructure to simplify virtualization, automation, and ongoing operations.
Successful transformation of the data center infrastructure requires coop-eration among server, network, and storage assets; these capabilities are available with the Cisco Unified Computing System™ platform. Resources that are highly standardized and treated as a resource pool, unlike resources in traditional servers, storage, and network silos, allow dynamic provisioning. Hardware and servers can be made completely transparent to the OS and the applications that run on them. This “stateless computing” allows the OS and applications to move from one server to another.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Facilities and Infrastructure
Customers are adopting next-generation infrastructure two to three times faster than they had planned; therefore, when designing infrastructure, it is important to plan for future growth and retirement of old assets.
When infrastructure is designed to function as an efficient system, it helps:
• Simplify operations and lower costs
• Provide a stable, secure, and cost-efficient foundation to deliver highly available applications
• Reduce complexity of virtualization and automation
• Transition from legacy systems to a modern architecture that is agile, cost- effective, and scalable
• Tame the sprawl of active resources, unstructured data, application and web servers, and virtual machines
• Enable “plug-and-play” capacity
Bringing together all the elements in the data center is the first step toward a simple operation model that enables IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS).
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Facilities and Infrastructure
Cisco provides a complete architecture platform designed specifically to supportvirtualization in the data center. Cisco Unified Data Center changes the economicsof the data center by unifying compute, storage, networking, virtualization, andmanagement into a single platform. This is designed to increase operating effi-ciencies, simplify operations, and provide business agility—essential for deployingIT as a service and cloud computing.
Computing: Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS®) anchors the data center architec-ture with a highly scalable system-level computing solution that integrates com-puting, access network, and storage network resources. The UCS platform uses integrated, model-based management to simplify and speed deployment of virtu-alized environments, bringing the network directly to server and virtual machines for increased performance, security, and manageability.
Network: Cisco Unified Fabric delivers high-performance data and storage networking to simplify deployment, help ensure quality of experience, and reduce operating costs. Cisco’s integrated network services provide high-speed connectivity and high availability, increase application performance, and reduce security risks in multitenant environments.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Facilities and Infrastructure
Storage: Multiprotocol storage networks start with the reliable performance and rich, ma-ture functionality of Fiber Channel SANs that extend seamlessly into the ethernet realm, resulting in a single network with the flexibility to deploy both protocols at any point in the path between server and storage. Cisco has developed integrated systems with partners such as EMC, VMware, Hitachi Data Systems, and NetApp, which feature Cisco UCS, Unified Fabric, and partner storage. The result is a standardized infrastructure and the foundation to rapidly deliver data center applications, virtualized desktops, and cloud computing services.
Case Studies:
Melbourne Water Reduces Data Center Energy Consumption By 40 Percent
Elon University Grows Capacity with New Data Center Platform
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Virtualization and Abstraction
The combination of Virtualization and Abstraction makes cloud computing possible. Virtualization is one of the biggest trends in IT, and for good reason. Virtualization solutions such as VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, and Red Hat offer separate computing functions from physical hardware and allow users to easily share resources. Virtualization enables IT to provide services that scale seamlessly across a standardized infrastructure. Server virtualization allows applications to run in separate, isolated partitions—or virtual machines— within a single server and enables workloads to be moved as necessary, providing significant benefits.
BEST PRACTICE
Expand virtualization across computing, storage, and networking resources. Design virtualized environments to support bare-metal and virtual provisioning.
At present, a number of workloads still cannot be run in a virtual environ-ment for a variety of reasons. Infrastructure must be thoughtfully designed to allow bare-metal provisioning while still providing the enhanced benefits of virtualization.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Virtualization and Abstraction
Virtualization fundamentally changes the way that IT managers think about com-puting resources. They no longer have to manage individual servers and instead can concentrate on the services that the technology can provide. Server virtual-ization is propelling storage and network virtualization, which is also referred to as abstraction. Storage virtualization integrates physical storage from multiple network storage devices so that they appear as one device. Network virtualiza-tion combines available network resources and treats all servers and services as a single pool of resources that can be redeployed in real time to meet user demand.
Abstraction hides the complexity from the user and presents a single, high-level, and simplified concept of a data center’s hardware, network, infrastructure, and storage resources as a single fabric. By hiding unnecessary details about resourc-es, abstraction allows IT managers to focus on the applications and services that they want to deploy.
A unified platform that delivers rapid deployment through automated configuration will simplify architecture and reduce costs. Virtualization must be built into thenetwork, allowing administrators to manage virtual machines and physical servers the same way, providing massive scalability along with uncompromised security,visibility, and control.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Virtualization and Abstraction
Cisco Nexus 1000V switches simplify and scale virtual networking. By adding virtualization intelligence to your data center, you get highly secure, multitenant services.
Cisco recommends a phased virtualization roadmap that makes financial sense and also addresses IT concerns. Organizations can accelerate the adoption of a virtualization solution and lay the foundation to securely manage policy changesand compliance concerns across the server, network, voice, video, and storage components.
Virtualization is one of the biggest differences between a traditional data center and a cloud data center, offering increased performance, consolidation ratios, and scalability while lowering the total cost of ownership. It also lays the groundwork for a service-oriented infrastructure and is an important first step to moving a data center toward automation and orchestration.
Information about desktop virtualization can be found in domain 8.
Case study:
Tatts Group Drives Positive Change Through Consolidation and Virtualization
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Putting It All Together
Simplify operations, improve asset utilization, and lower total cost of ownership.
The Cisco Domain Ten framework defines the factors you need to consider to achieve successful consolidation and virtualization. While consolidation and virtu-alization involve primarily the first two domains, understanding all ten enables you to lay a foundation for future data center transformation.
Together with our partners, Cisco can help you determine the right data center strategy and smooth the way to a successful deployment so that you can real-ize your business goals. We bring together people, processes, and technologies to accelerate your initiatives and help ensure that you realize the full value of your network and IT infrastructure.
Explore Cisco Services for Virtualization.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
ApplicationsWelcome to the Applications quick link.
Continue your journey by clicking on any highlighted domain to your left, starting with domain 1. These domains are the ones most relevant to Applications.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Facilities and Infrastructure
Every data center begins at the physical resource domain, what Cisco refers to as Facilities and Infrastructure. This domain includes active computing, storage, and networking resources and supporting facilities, such as power and cooling equip-ment. These elements are common to all data centers and must be part of any environmental, management, and implementation considerations.
BEST PRACTICE
Standardize infrastructure to simplify virtualization, automation, and ongoing operations.
Successful transformation of the data center infrastructure requires coop-eration among server, network, and storage assets; these capabilities are available with the Cisco Unified Computing System™ platform. Resources that are highly standardized and treated as a resource pool, unlike resources in traditional servers, storage, and network silos, allow dynamic provisioning. Hardware and servers can be made completely transparent to the OS and the applications that run on them. This “stateless computing” allows the OS and applications to move from one server to another.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Facilities and Infrastructure
Customers are adopting next-generation infrastructure two to three times faster than they had planned; therefore, when designing infrastructure, it is important to plan for future growth and retirement of old assets.
When infrastructure is designed to function as an efficient system, it helps:
• Simplify operations and lower costs
• Provide a stable, secure, and cost-efficient foundation to deliver highly available applications
• Reduce complexity of virtualization and automation
• Transition from legacy systems to a modern architecture that is agile, cost- effective, and scalable
• Tame the sprawl of active resources, unstructured data, application and web servers, and virtual machines
• Enable “plug-and-play” capacity
Bringing together all the elements in the data center is the first step toward a simple operation model that enables IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS).
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Facilities and Infrastructure
Cisco provides a complete architecture platform designed specifically to supportvirtualization in the data center. Cisco Unified Data Center changes the economicsof the data center by unifying compute, storage, networking, virtualization, andmanagement into a single platform. This is designed to increase operating effi-ciencies, simplify operations, and provide business agility—essential for deployingIT as a service and cloud computing.
Computing: Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS®) anchors the data center architec-ture with a highly scalable system-level computing solution that integrates com-puting, access network, and storage network resources. The UCS platform uses integrated, model-based management to simplify and speed deployment of virtu-alized environments, bringing the network directly to server and virtual machines for increased performance, security, and manageability.
Network: Cisco Unified Fabric delivers high-performance data and storage networking to simplify deployment, help ensure quality of experience, and reduce operating costs. Cisco’s integrated network services provide high-speed connectivity and high availability, increase application performance, and reduce security risks in multitenant environments.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Facilities and Infrastructure
Storage: Multiprotocol storage networks start with the reliable performance and rich, ma-ture functionality of Fiber Channel SANs that extend seamlessly into the ethernet realm, resulting in a single network with the flexibility to deploy both protocols at any point in the path between server and storage. Cisco has developed integrated systems with partners such as EMC, VMware, Hitachi Data Systems, and NetApp, which feature Cisco UCS, Unified Fabric, and partner storage. The result is a standardized infrastructure and the foundation to rapidly deliver data center applications, virtualized desktops, and cloud computing services.
Case Studies:
Melbourne Water Reduces Data Center Energy Consumption By 40 Percent
Elon University Grows Capacity with New Data Center Platform
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Virtualization and Abstraction
The combination of Virtualization and Abstraction makes cloud computing possible. Virtualization is one of the biggest trends in IT, and for good reason. Virtualization solutions such as VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, and Red Hat offer separate computing functions from physical hardware and allow users to easily share resources. Virtualization enables IT to provide services that scale seamlessly across a standardized infrastructure. Server virtualization allows applications to run in separate, isolated partitions—or virtual machines— within a single server and enables workloads to be moved as necessary, providing significant benefits.
BEST PRACTICE
Expand virtualization across computing, storage, and networking resources. Design virtualized environments to support bare-metal and virtual provisioning.
At present, a number of workloads still cannot be run in a virtual environ-ment for a variety of reasons. Infrastructure must be thoughtfully designed to allow bare-metal provisioning while still providing the enhanced benefits of virtualization.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Virtualization and Abstraction
Virtualization fundamentally changes the way that IT managers think about com-puting resources. They no longer have to manage individual servers and instead can concentrate on the services that the technology can provide. Server virtual-ization is propelling storage and network virtualization, which is also referred to as abstraction. Storage virtualization integrates physical storage from multiple network storage devices so that they appear as one device. Network virtualiza-tion combines available network resources and treats all servers and services as a single pool of resources that can be redeployed in real time to meet user demand.
Abstraction hides the complexity from the user and presents a single, high-level, and simplified concept of a data center’s hardware, network, infrastructure, and storage resources as a single fabric. By hiding unnecessary details about resourc-es, abstraction allows IT managers to focus on the applications and services that they want to deploy.
A unified platform that delivers rapid deployment through automated configuration will simplify architecture and reduce costs. Virtualization must be built into thenetwork, allowing administrators to manage virtual machines and physical servers the same way, providing massive scalability along with uncompromised security,visibility, and control.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Virtualization and Abstraction
Cisco Nexus 1000V switches simplify and scale virtual networking. By adding virtualization intelligence to your data center, you get highly secure, multitenant services.
Cisco recommends a phased virtualization roadmap that makes financial sense and also addresses IT concerns. Organizations can accelerate the adoption of a virtualization solution and lay the foundation to securely manage policy changesand compliance concerns across the server, network, voice, video, and storage components.
Virtualization is one of the biggest differences between a traditional data center and a cloud data center, offering increased performance, consolidation ratios, and scalability while lowering the total cost of ownership. It also lays the groundwork for a service-oriented infrastructure and is an important first step to moving a data center toward automation and orchestration.
Information about desktop virtualization can be found in domain 8.
Case study:
Tatts Group Drives Positive Change Through Consolidation and Virtualization
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Automation and Orchestration
The Automation and Orchestration domain is based on management automation software. This software enables IT organizations to automate and orchestrate what goes on within the virtualization domain sitting on top of the standard infrastructure.
This domain can streamline repetitive data center processes - such as applica-tion and server OS deployment - and drastically reduce provisioning time for new services.
BEST PRACTICE
Automate an entire process including IT and business operations. Understanding and incorporating all interdependencies increases automation success.
For example, consider an organization that is automating the provisioning of new server resources. If the IT team automates only the IT part of the task, they may have to pause and get manual approval to assign IP addresses. They may also have to get manual approval to allocate resources, which can slow down the process.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Automation and Orchestration
Automation, which replaces manual actions with software executables and scripts, has been widely used by IT professionals for many years. An organization spends time and resources building servers, configuring storage arrays, making network changes, and performing countless other repetitive and expensive tasks. Auto-mation eliminates the need for such tasks to be performed manually, and it com-pletes them with greater accuracy.
Orchestration links a variety of automated tasks together to provision a new service. It is performed using a set of tools and workflow templates that integrate multiple discrete tasks and management actions by providing a software-based workflow using standard interfaces.
Together, automation and orchestration enable organizations to realize the full efficiency benefits promised by new IT models.
This domain lays the foundation for two areas: a self-service user portal and workload automation.
Case studies:
Cisco Services Helps Lower TCO for Cisco IT
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
User Portal
The User Portal defines the user experience and is the domain in which we work, live, and play. Users can order what they need from a menu of standard options using an intuitive portal interface (for example, Amazon.com). The user portal has two main components: the software tool, which provides the functions, and the governance model, which enables the tool. Management can control and track each service from initial request to decommissioning. IT can enable self-service provisioning of application and infrastructure requests within minutes instead of weeks.
BEST PRACTICE
Determine the scope of the user portal, including current and future needs. Will it be used only for IT infrastructure tasks? Will it offer new applications? Or will it enable access to other functional assets such as marketing campaigns?
It is also critical to determine who can access the user portal, what limita-tions are placed on what each user can see, and how sophisticated the user portal will be.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
User Portal
Figure 1: Example of a user portal interface
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
User Portal
It is important to thoughtfully consider the usability of the portal; together withdomains 5 and 6, the user portal supports consistent ordering and delivery pro-cesses through automation and IT policy enforcement. Creating a single interface that interacts with the complex computing systems empower users to order what they want and are authorized to order.
Learn about Cisco Cloud Portal. It helps IT organizations:
• Encourage adoption of standardized options with a menu in an online catalog
• Deploy an internal private cloud and govern public cloud usage with a self-ser-vice portal
• Manage the lifecycle of services and monitor consumption for pay-per-use tracking
• Improve visibility into demand to help ensure more accurate capacity planning
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Platform
The Platform Domain provides an environment for developers. What sets the plat-form apart from other domains is the platform combines commercially available software elements on top of the infrastructure. Software includes OS, middleware and database applications.
BEST PRACTICE
Reduce the number of OS images supported to simplify management and deployment of a cloud platform.
Many organizations have one unique OS image per server. However, IT departments have learned as they move toward automation that a better approach is to use a small number of standardized OS images that can apply to multiple servers, to standardize automation. For example, a tradi-tional guideline is the use of one system administrator for every 25 servers. A best practice is to have one administrator for every 100 servers. With standardization, organizations can move to one administrator for every 2,500 servers, greatly reducing the number of staff members devoted to system administration and allowing members to focus on other activities.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Platform
The platform includes the provisioning of these software elements through the user portal, providing the platform-as-a-service (PaaS). For instance, with PaaS, clients can offer database-as-a-service capabilities with the database administra-tor (DBA) able to enter through the user portal to provision the database.
To be effective in this domain, clients must be able to justify the number of OS, middleware, and database versions they are supporting. Each variation in platform components adds complexity to the overall system, so decisions about the plat-form layer need to be made with care.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Applications
The applications that are physically located and run on the cloud infrastructure are commonly referred to as software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings. Just like the software in the platform domain, the applications in domain 8 need to be prepared before they can be provisioned in the cloud. Before migrating to the cloud, you need to determine whether your applications are compatible with a cloud environ-ment. Many existing applications were not developed to take advantage of cloud infrastructure, and as a result they will not run well in a cloud infrastructure.
Cisco can help determine how the application stack should look. We can help identify which applications are well suited for the cloud, which will work with some remediation and which are inappropriate for cloud deployment. Cisco can help enterprises understand the scale of their cloud environment and the size of the infrastructure needed and then migrate the applications to the cloud infrastructure.
BEST PRACTICE
Determine the application strategy by considering where the applica-tions will reside, the suitability of applications for the target environment, and potential application modernization.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Business Applications
When migrating or deploying business applications such as those from Oracle, Microsoft, or SAP, organizations must address the application environment. They need to:
• Migrate applications to a computing platform that helps reduce costs and increase business agility
• Decide which applications to virtualize and modernize
• Decide which operating systems to standardize
• Identify the core business-critical applications and their dependencies
• Determine application data location and proximity for low-latency user experiences
• Profile applications for capacity and reliability
• Understand the complex interdependencies of the network, storage, computing, and server layers and how they affect application layout
• Assess the effects on disaster recovery plans
• Simplify application management
• Automate provisioning
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Business Applications
All these tasks require the organization to take a strategic approach to align business goals with the target application environment.
Case study:
Avago Technologies Accelerate Business Cycle Times
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Desktop Virtualization
End users are moving towards a world of greater workplace mobility by bringing their own devices to work. The need for access to corporate applications and data at anytime, from anywhere, and on any device is increasing daily. Desktop virtu-alization technologies, which replace the traditional desktop environment with a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to meet the demand for secure mobile access, delivers these capabilities and when provided through the cloud, are combined with the ubiquitous access, elasticity, and measured service that distinguish cloud computing and make delivering these services both viable and practical. Desktop virtualization may also include application, virtual desktop, and remote services. It decouples application execution from where the client physically resides, allowing new client computing paradigms.
BEST PRACTICE
Avoid the initial capital costs associated with deployment of a virtual desktop solution. Explore cloud based “as-a-service” options. In ad-dition, inquire about storage and network optimization approaches and technologies to reduce storage and bandwidth requirements and improve performance.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Desktop Virtualization
Benefits of desktop virtualization include: simplified desktop and application man-agement; reduced operational costs; secured company data; and the foundation for a rich user experience.
Cisco Desktop Virtualization Services deliver rich, expert-based services end to end that can help you rapidly plan, build, and manage a desktop virtualization solution of your choice. These services also help provide the right fit with your existing investments and align your IT and business strategies. Transitioning to desktop virtualization requires alignment across numerous technologies and IT departments. This change can be a time-consuming effort, often requiring spe-cific skills across multiple technology domains that are not readily available in most IT departments. Cisco Desktop Virtualization Services can streamline this transfor-mation with expert-based services that can help you rapidly achieve the desktop virtualization solution of your choice anywhere, with any device, over any medium.
Case Studies:
Seattle University Regains Control of Desktop Applications
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Collaboration Applications
Cloud environments provide a new level of flexibility in application and data deliv-ery. Applications and services that are provisioned from a cloud provide operation benefits without the capital expenses of on-premises environments. As direct consumers of cloud-hosted applications and services from Cisco and our part-ners, end users get access to high-performance, enterprise-class applications and services.
Learn more about Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solutions.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Application Modernization
Besides migrating applications to a more efficient infrastructure, there are two other ways to improve application management: workload automation and appli-cation modernization.
Workload automation includes automation of common tasks such as running scheduled batch workloads and event-based business processes, as well as determining where and when to run them, without the need to manage scripts or customize existing tools. Workload automation can be used for a wide variety of business processes and helps simplify operations, reduce costs, and promote business flexibility.
Application modernization involves migrating custom applications to a more efficient infrastructure and transforming them into stateless applications that can dynamically respond to changing business requirements. For example, if a state-less application is hosted in the United States but is needed in Australia, it can be run in Australia, and all the local security policies will be respected. Performance will be better because the application does not have to be run over the WAN.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Security and Compliance
Chief Information Officers (CIOs) frequently cite security concerns and compli-ance requirements as two of their biggest challenges. These challenges arise from the way that organizations consume IT services today, led by cloud com-puting and expanded outsourcing. How to maintain the security of shared infra-structure consistently tops IT professionals’ list of cloud concerns and may be the main reason that some CIOs have been slow to adopt cloud computing. CIOs are also facing compliance issues that did not exist a few years ago: Sarbanes-Oxley, increased government scrutiny, and foreign regulations.
BEST PRACTICE
Address security and compliance risks posed by the lack of physical boundaries by building security into the IT architecture. Since the network connects everything, defining security in the network is essential.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Security and Compliance
The security and compliance domain helps IT departments make the transition to cloud computing—whether to a public, private, or hybrid cloud—while maintaining security and meeting compliance objectives. Organizations must document secu-rity and compliance requirements and provide an assessment of current vulner-abilities and deviations from security best practices. As organizations develop a cloud architecture, they must be sure to include experts who understand how to incorporate security and compliance safeguards into complex data center and cloud environments.
Enterprises look to segmentation to manage and organize data in the data center. Each segmented area must be protected and have consistent security controls that span both the physical network and the cloud to deter external and internal threats.
As shown in figure 3, the top three data center security care-abouts are:
• Segmentation: Enforce consistent policies across physical and virtual boundaries to protect data at rest and in motion.
• Threat defense: Protect businesses from external and internal threats.
• Visibility: Maintain compliance and provide insight into data center operations.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Security and Compliancefigure 3
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Security and Compliance
Data centers are not protected in a physical sense, and approaches to secu-rity are changing dramatically. Security and compliance postures will continue to evolve as these new infrastructures and services are deployed. Clients must continuously evaluate and review security policies as new services and capabili-ties are launched.
Whether your challenge is securely connecting multi-site, multi-tenant physical and virtual environments, providing secure access to business applications and data from any device, protecting information and privacy, or enabling secure col-laboration anywhere, Cisco Services can help you plan, build, and manage perva-sive security across the data center infrastructure and within and between clouds to protect your business.
Case Studies:
Ecobank Cuts Costs and Improves Time to Market While Ensuring Compliance with International Standards California Department of Water Resources Collaborates Securely with Outside Organizations
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Process and Governance
The process and governance domain affects the entire data center. Aligning pro-cesses with business objectives enables a business to be more efficient, reduces costs, and improves customer satisfaction. Governance also works to monitor and document both the successes and shortcomings of an organization. Success-fully implemented business processes span the entire organization transparently in both the data center and the cloud environment. IT and corporate governance must also adhere to and enforce processes that define the way that the cloud is used and managed. Redesigning the processes to take advantage of automation and the standardized infrastructure can also help organizations achieve full finan-cial benefits.
BEST PRACTICE
Redesign processes to reduce the need for human intervention, and update the existing compliance and policy framework to meet regulatory and industry compliance requirements.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Process and Governance
As part of a plan for lifecycle management of virtualized environments, the com-pute, network, and storage domains of virtualized data centers must be managed, measured, operated, and planned together as one holistic environment that meets the unique requirements of the business. Processes and tools that do not ad-equately support virtualized environments must be identified, evaluated, changed, or enhanced based on best practices.
As shown in figure 4, new IT models require a different operations approach to resolve issues across a converged virtualized infrastructure. Tools, policy, and process changes are needed to:
• Accelerate the provisioning and deprovisioning process• Adjust to the elasticity of virtualized data center services• Assure SLA commitments• Deliver services that are no longer tightly coupled to the hardware
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Process and Governance
figure 4: Click image to activate demo
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Process and Governance
Build a high level of security into your architecture from the start to set a higher compliance and security threshold. Cisco can help you understand where you need highly standardized processes, where you need to be highly flexible, and what your unique requirements are. Cisco delivers solutions appropriate to your organization’s compliance and policy framework to help meet global requirements by incorporating everything into existing policies and procedures.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Putting It All Together
Improve application performance, reduce costs and increase business agility.
The Cisco Domain Ten framework defines the factors you need to consider to achieve successful application migration, modernization, or deployment. Depend-ing on your needs, you may want to run applications on bare metal, in a virtual-ized environment, in a cloud, or in a heterogeneous environment that combines all these approaches. Before you can determine your application strategy, you need to understand what applications are suited for the cloud.
Together with our partners, Cisco can help you understand application interde-pendencies, determine the right strategy, and smooth the way to a successful deployment so you can realize your business vision. We bring together people, processes, and technologies to accelerate your application initiatives and help you migrate to a more cost-effective infrastructure, automate application workloads, and improve application performance.
Learn more about services from Cisco and our partners.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Desktop VirtualizationWelcome to the Desktop Virtualization quick link.
Continue your journey by clicking on any highlighted domain to your left, starting with domain 1. These domains are the ones most relevant to Desktop Virtualization.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Facilities and Infrastructure
Every data center begins at the physical resource domain, what Cisco refers to as Facilities and Infrastructure. This domain includes active computing, storage, and networking resources and supporting facilities, such as power and cooling equip-ment. These elements are common to all data centers and must be part of any environmental, management, and implementation considerations.
BEST PRACTICE
Standardize infrastructure to simplify virtualization, automation, and ongoing operations.
Successful transformation of the data center infrastructure requires coop-eration among server, network, and storage assets; these capabilities are available with the Cisco Unified Computing System™ platform. Resources that are highly standardized and treated as a resource pool, unlike resources in traditional servers, storage, and network silos, allow dynamic provisioning. Hardware and servers can be made completely transparent to the OS and the applications that run on them. This “stateless computing” allows the OS and applications to move from one server to another.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Facilities and Infrastructure
Customers are adopting next-generation infrastructure two to three times faster than they had planned; therefore, when designing infrastructure, it is important to plan for future growth and retirement of old assets.
When infrastructure is designed to function as an efficient system, it helps:
• Simplify operations and lower costs
• Provide a stable, secure, and cost-efficient foundation to deliver highly available applications
• Reduce complexity of virtualization and automation
• Transition from legacy systems to a modern architecture that is agile, cost- effective, and scalable
• Tame the sprawl of active resources, unstructured data, application and web servers, and virtual machines
• Enable “plug-and-play” capacity
Bringing together all the elements in the data center is the first step toward a simple operation model that enables IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS).
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Facilities and Infrastructure
Cisco provides a complete architecture platform designed specifically to supportvirtualization in the data center. Cisco Unified Data Center changes the economicsof the data center by unifying compute, storage, networking, virtualization, andmanagement into a single platform. This is designed to increase operating effi-ciencies, simplify operations, and provide business agility—essential for deployingIT as a service and cloud computing.
Computing: Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS®) anchors the data center architec-ture with a highly scalable system-level computing solution that integrates com-puting, access network, and storage network resources. The UCS platform uses integrated, model-based management to simplify and speed deployment of virtu-alized environments, bringing the network directly to server and virtual machines for increased performance, security, and manageability.
Network: Cisco Unified Fabric delivers high-performance data and storage networking to simplify deployment, help ensure quality of experience, and reduce operating costs. Cisco’s integrated network services provide high-speed connectivity and high availability, increase application performance, and reduce security risks in multitenant environments.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Facilities and Infrastructure
Storage: Multiprotocol storage networks start with the reliable performance and rich, ma-ture functionality of Fiber Channel SANs that extend seamlessly into the ethernet realm, resulting in a single network with the flexibility to deploy both protocols at any point in the path between server and storage. Cisco has developed integrated systems with partners such as EMC, VMware, Hitachi Data Systems, and NetApp, which feature Cisco UCS, Unified Fabric, and partner storage. The result is a standardized infrastructure and the foundation to rapidly deliver data center applications, virtualized desktops, and cloud computing services.
Case Studies:
Melbourne Water Reduces Data Center Energy Consumption By 40 Percent
Elon University Grows Capacity with New Data Center Platform
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Virtualization and Abstraction
The combination of Virtualization and Abstraction makes cloud computing possible. Virtualization is one of the biggest trends in IT, and for good reason. Virtualization solutions such as VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, and Red Hat offer separate computing functions from physical hardware and allow users to easily share resources. Virtualization enables IT to provide services that scale seamlessly across a standardized infrastructure. Server virtualization allows applications to run in separate, isolated partitions—or virtual machines— within a single server and enables workloads to be moved as necessary, providing significant benefits.
BEST PRACTICE
Expand virtualization across computing, storage, and networking resources. Design virtualized environments to support bare-metal and virtual provisioning.
At present, a number of workloads still cannot be run in a virtual environ-ment for a variety of reasons. Infrastructure must be thoughtfully designed to allow bare-metal provisioning while still providing the enhanced benefits of virtualization.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Virtualization and Abstraction
Virtualization fundamentally changes the way that IT managers think about com-puting resources. They no longer have to manage individual servers and instead can concentrate on the services that the technology can provide. Server virtual-ization is propelling storage and network virtualization, which is also referred to as abstraction. Storage virtualization integrates physical storage from multiple network storage devices so that they appear as one device. Network virtualiza-tion combines available network resources and treats all servers and services as a single pool of resources that can be redeployed in real time to meet user demand.
Abstraction hides the complexity from the user and presents a single, high-level, and simplified concept of a data center’s hardware, network, infrastructure, and storage resources as a single fabric. By hiding unnecessary details about resourc-es, abstraction allows IT managers to focus on the applications and services that they want to deploy.
A unified platform that delivers rapid deployment through automated configuration will simplify architecture and reduce costs. Virtualization must be built into thenetwork, allowing administrators to manage virtual machines and physical servers the same way, providing massive scalability along with uncompromised security,visibility, and control.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Virtualization and Abstraction
Cisco Nexus 1000V switches simplify and scale virtual networking. By adding virtualization intelligence to your data center, you get highly secure, multitenant services.
Cisco recommends a phased virtualization roadmap that makes financial sense and also addresses IT concerns. Organizations can accelerate the adoption of a virtualization solution and lay the foundation to securely manage policy changesand compliance concerns across the server, network, voice, video, and storage components.
Virtualization is one of the biggest differences between a traditional data center and a cloud data center, offering increased performance, consolidation ratios, and scalability while lowering the total cost of ownership. It also lays the groundwork for a service-oriented infrastructure and is an important first step to moving a data center toward automation and orchestration.
Information about desktop virtualization can be found in domain 8.
Case study:
Tatts Group Drives Positive Change Through Consolidation and Virtualization
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Automation and Orchestration
The Automation and Orchestration domain is based on management automation software. This software enables IT organizations to automate and orchestrate what goes on within the virtualization domain sitting on top of the standard infrastructure.
This domain can streamline repetitive data center processes - such as applica-tion and server OS deployment - and drastically reduce provisioning time for new services.
BEST PRACTICE
Automate an entire process including IT and business operations. Understanding and incorporating all interdependencies increases automation success.
For example, consider an organization that is automating the provisioning of new server resources. If the IT team automates only the IT part of the task, they may have to pause and get manual approval to assign IP addresses. They may also have to get manual approval to allocate resources, which can slow down the process.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Automation and Orchestration
Automation, which replaces manual actions with software executables and scripts, has been widely used by IT professionals for many years. An organization spends time and resources building servers, configuring storage arrays, making network changes, and performing countless other repetitive and expensive tasks. Auto-mation eliminates the need for such tasks to be performed manually, and it com-pletes them with greater accuracy.
Orchestration links a variety of automated tasks together to provision a new service. It is performed using a set of tools and workflow templates that integrate multiple discrete tasks and management actions by providing a software-based workflow using standard interfaces.
Together, automation and orchestration enable organizations to realize the full efficiency benefits promised by new IT models.
This domain lays the foundation for two areas: a self-service user portal and workload automation.
Case studies:
Cisco Services Helps Lower TCO for Cisco IT
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
User Portal
The User Portal defines the user experience and is the domain in which we work, live, and play. Users can order what they need from a menu of standard options using an intuitive portal interface (for example, Amazon.com). The user portal has two main components: the software tool, which provides the functions, and the governance model, which enables the tool. Management can control and track each service from initial request to decommissioning. IT can enable self-service provisioning of application and infrastructure requests within minutes instead of weeks.
BEST PRACTICE
Determine the scope of the user portal, including current and future needs. Will it be used only for IT infrastructure tasks? Will it offer new applications? Or will it enable access to other functional assets such as marketing campaigns?
It is also critical to determine who can access the user portal, what limita-tions are placed on what each user can see, and how sophisticated the user portal will be.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
User Portal
Figure 1: Example of a user portal interface
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
User Portal
It is important to thoughtfully consider the usability of the portal; together withdomains 5 and 6, the user portal supports consistent ordering and delivery pro-cesses through automation and IT policy enforcement. Creating a single interface that interacts with the complex computing systems empower users to order what they want and are authorized to order.
Learn about Cisco Cloud Portal. It helps IT organizations:
• Encourage adoption of standardized options with a menu in an online catalog
• Deploy an internal private cloud and govern public cloud usage with a self-ser-vice portal
• Manage the lifecycle of services and monitor consumption for pay-per-use tracking
• Improve visibility into demand to help ensure more accurate capacity planning
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Platform
The Platform Domain provides an environment for developers. What sets the plat-form apart from other domains is the platform combines commercially available software elements on top of the infrastructure. Software includes OS, middleware and database applications.
BEST PRACTICE
Reduce the number of OS images supported to simplify management and deployment of a cloud platform.
Many organizations have one unique OS image per server. However, IT departments have learned as they move toward automation that a better approach is to use a small number of standardized OS images that can apply to multiple servers, to standardize automation. For example, a tradi-tional guideline is the use of one system administrator for every 25 servers. A best practice is to have one administrator for every 100 servers. With standardization, organizations can move to one administrator for every 2,500 servers, greatly reducing the number of staff members devoted to system administration and allowing members to focus on other activities.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Platform
The platform includes the provisioning of these software elements through the user portal, providing the platform-as-a-service (PaaS). For instance, with PaaS, clients can offer database-as-a-service capabilities with the database administra-tor (DBA) able to enter through the user portal to provision the database.
To be effective in this domain, clients must be able to justify the number of OS, middleware, and database versions they are supporting. Each variation in platform components adds complexity to the overall system, so decisions about the plat-form layer need to be made with care.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Applications
The applications that are physically located and run on the cloud infrastructure are commonly referred to as software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings. Just like the software in the platform domain, the applications in domain 8 need to be prepared before they can be provisioned in the cloud. Before migrating to the cloud, you need to determine whether your applications are compatible with a cloud environ-ment. Many existing applications were not developed to take advantage of cloud infrastructure, and as a result they will not run well in a cloud infrastructure.
Cisco can help determine how the application stack should look. We can help identify which applications are well suited for the cloud, which will work with some remediation and which are inappropriate for cloud deployment. Cisco can help enterprises understand the scale of their cloud environment and the size of the infrastructure needed and then migrate the applications to the cloud infrastructure.
BEST PRACTICE
Determine the application strategy by considering where the applica-tions will reside, the suitability of applications for the target environment, and potential application modernization.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Business Applications
When migrating or deploying business applications such as those from Oracle, Microsoft, or SAP, organizations must address the application environment. They need to:
• Migrate applications to a computing platform that helps reduce costs and increase business agility
• Decide which applications to virtualize and modernize
• Decide which operating systems to standardize
• Identify the core business-critical applications and their dependencies
• Determine application data location and proximity for low-latency user experiences
• Profile applications for capacity and reliability
• Understand the complex interdependencies of the network, storage, computing, and server layers and how they affect application layout
• Assess the effects on disaster recovery plans
• Simplify application management
• Automate provisioning
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Business Applications
All these tasks require the organization to take a strategic approach to align business goals with the target application environment.
Case study:
Avago Technologies Accelerate Business Cycle Times
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Desktop Virtualization
End users are moving towards a world of greater workplace mobility by bringing their own devices to work. The need for access to corporate applications and data at anytime, from anywhere, and on any device is increasing daily. Desktop virtu-alization technologies, which replace the traditional desktop environment with a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to meet the demand for secure mobile access, delivers these capabilities and when provided through the cloud, are combined with the ubiquitous access, elasticity, and measured service that distinguish cloud computing and make delivering these services both viable and practical. Desktop virtualization may also include application, virtual desktop, and remote services. It decouples application execution from where the client physically resides, allowing new client computing paradigms.
BEST PRACTICE
Avoid the initial capital costs associated with deployment of a virtual desktop solution. Explore cloud based “as-a-service” options. In ad-dition, inquire about storage and network optimization approaches and technologies to reduce storage and bandwidth requirements and improve performance.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Desktop Virtualization
Benefits of desktop virtualization include: simplified desktop and application man-agement; reduced operational costs; secured company data; and the foundation for a rich user experience.
Cisco Desktop Virtualization Services deliver rich, expert-based services end to end that can help you rapidly plan, build, and manage a desktop virtualization solution of your choice. These services also help provide the right fit with your existing investments and align your IT and business strategies. Transitioning to desktop virtualization requires alignment across numerous technologies and IT departments. This change can be a time-consuming effort, often requiring spe-cific skills across multiple technology domains that are not readily available in most IT departments. Cisco Desktop Virtualization Services can streamline this transfor-mation with expert-based services that can help you rapidly achieve the desktop virtualization solution of your choice anywhere, with any device, over any medium.
Case Studies:
Seattle University Regains Control of Desktop Applications
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Collaboration Applications
Cloud environments provide a new level of flexibility in application and data deliv-ery. Applications and services that are provisioned from a cloud provide operation benefits without the capital expenses of on-premises environments. As direct consumers of cloud-hosted applications and services from Cisco and our part-ners, end users get access to high-performance, enterprise-class applications and services.
Learn more about Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solutions.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Application Modernization
Besides migrating applications to a more efficient infrastructure, there are two other ways to improve application management: workload automation and appli-cation modernization.
Workload automation includes automation of common tasks such as running scheduled batch workloads and event-based business processes, as well as determining where and when to run them, without the need to manage scripts or customize existing tools. Workload automation can be used for a wide variety of business processes and helps simplify operations, reduce costs, and promote business flexibility.
Application modernization involves migrating custom applications to a more efficient infrastructure and transforming them into stateless applications that can dynamically respond to changing business requirements. For example, if a state-less application is hosted in the United States but is needed in Australia, it can be run in Australia, and all the local security policies will be respected. Performance will be better because the application does not have to be run over the WAN.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Security and Compliance
Chief Information Officers (CIOs) frequently cite security concerns and compli-ance requirements as two of their biggest challenges. These challenges arise from the way that organizations consume IT services today, led by cloud com-puting and expanded outsourcing. How to maintain the security of shared infra-structure consistently tops IT professionals’ list of cloud concerns and may be the main reason that some CIOs have been slow to adopt cloud computing. CIOs are also facing compliance issues that did not exist a few years ago: Sarbanes-Oxley, increased government scrutiny, and foreign regulations.
BEST PRACTICE
Address security and compliance risks posed by the lack of physical boundaries by building security into the IT architecture. Since the network connects everything, defining security in the network is essential.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Security and Compliance
The security and compliance domain helps IT departments make the transition to cloud computing—whether to a public, private, or hybrid cloud—while maintaining security and meeting compliance objectives. Organizations must document secu-rity and compliance requirements and provide an assessment of current vulner-abilities and deviations from security best practices. As organizations develop a cloud architecture, they must be sure to include experts who understand how to incorporate security and compliance safeguards into complex data center and cloud environments.
Enterprises look to segmentation to manage and organize data in the data center. Each segmented area must be protected and have consistent security controls that span both the physical network and the cloud to deter external and internal threats.
As shown in figure 3, the top three data center security care-abouts are:
• Segmentation: Enforce consistent policies across physical and virtual boundaries to protect data at rest and in motion.
• Threat defense: Protect businesses from external and internal threats.
• Visibility: Maintain compliance and provide insight into data center operations.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Security and Compliancefigure 3
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Security and Compliance
Data centers are not protected in a physical sense, and approaches to secu-rity are changing dramatically. Security and compliance postures will continue to evolve as these new infrastructures and services are deployed. Clients must continuously evaluate and review security policies as new services and capabili-ties are launched.
Whether your challenge is securely connecting multi-site, multi-tenant physical and virtual environments, providing secure access to business applications and data from any device, protecting information and privacy, or enabling secure col-laboration anywhere, Cisco Services can help you plan, build, and manage perva-sive security across the data center infrastructure and within and between clouds to protect your business.
Case Studies:
Ecobank Cuts Costs and Improves Time to Market While Ensuring Compliance with International Standards California Department of Water Resources Collaborates Securely with Outside Organizations
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Process and Governance
The process and governance domain affects the entire data center. Aligning pro-cesses with business objectives enables a business to be more efficient, reduces costs, and improves customer satisfaction. Governance also works to monitor and document both the successes and shortcomings of an organization. Success-fully implemented business processes span the entire organization transparently in both the data center and the cloud environment. IT and corporate governance must also adhere to and enforce processes that define the way that the cloud is used and managed. Redesigning the processes to take advantage of automation and the standardized infrastructure can also help organizations achieve full finan-cial benefits.
BEST PRACTICE
Redesign processes to reduce the need for human intervention, and update the existing compliance and policy framework to meet regulatory and industry compliance requirements.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Process and Governance
As part of a plan for lifecycle management of virtualized environments, the com-pute, network, and storage domains of virtualized data centers must be managed, measured, operated, and planned together as one holistic environment that meets the unique requirements of the business. Processes and tools that do not ad-equately support virtualized environments must be identified, evaluated, changed, or enhanced based on best practices.
As shown in figure 4, new IT models require a different operations approach to resolve issues across a converged virtualized infrastructure. Tools, policy, and process changes are needed to:
• Accelerate the provisioning and deprovisioning process• Adjust to the elasticity of virtualized data center services• Assure SLA commitments• Deliver services that are no longer tightly coupled to the hardware
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Process and Governance
figure 4: Click image to activate demo
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Process and Governance
Build a high level of security into your architecture from the start to set a higher compliance and security threshold. Cisco can help you understand where you need highly standardized processes, where you need to be highly flexible, and what your unique requirements are. Cisco delivers solutions appropriate to your organization’s compliance and policy framework to help meet global requirements by incorporating everything into existing policies and procedures.
© 2012 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Putting It All Together
Meet workspace mobility demands, secure critical information, and enable a rich user experience.
The Cisco Domain Ten framework defines the factors you need to consider to provide a foundation for desktop virtualization.
Together with our partners, Cisco can help you determine the right desktop virtu-alization and unified workspace strategy, and smooth the way to a successful de-ployment so that you can realize your business vision. We bring together people, processes, and technologies to accelerate your solution and help ensure that your desktop, network, and IT infrastructure are secure and optimized.
Explore Cisco Services for Desktop Virtualization.
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