Cisco Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud 4.3.2 Information Guide
© 2012 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public.
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Cisco IT Case Study – June 2012
Cisco IT Elastic Infrastructure (CITEIS) Gen2
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
CHALLENGE
●
Increase business agility by automating end-to-
end infrastructure provisioning:
●
Offer costs comparable to third-party IaaS
offerings
SOLUTION
●
Developed new version of Cisco IT Elastic
Infrastructure Services (CITEIS) in just two
months, using Cisco Intelligent Automation for
Cloud, a commercially available toolset
months, using Cisco Intelligent Automation for
Cloud, a commercially available toolset
●
Provided two subscription models: pre-paid
resource pools and on-demand resources
●
Used standard Cisco Unified Data Center
platform as platform
RESULTS
●
Delivered computing, networking, and storage
resources in 15 minutes
●
Lowered infrastructure TCO by 27 percent
compared to earlier version of CITEIS
●
Signed up more than 50 internal customers to-
date
LESSONS LEARNED
●
Prepare early by virtualizing servers and
implementing a wire-once server architecture
●
Save development time by using a
commercially available toolset like Cisco
Intelligent Automation for Cloud instead of
developing the software internally
Intelligent Automation for Cloud instead of
developing the software internally
●
Develop the operational model early
NEXT STEPS
●
Host complete software lifecycle in the cloud,
including development, test, and production
●
Automate the platform-as-a-service (PaaS)
layer
How Cisco IT Automated End-to-End Infrastructure
Provisioning In an Internal Private Cloud
Provisioning In an Internal Private Cloud
Offering Infrastructure as a Service increased agility, lowered costs, and enhanced
security.
security.
Challenge
Cisco’s competitive advantage stems from its ability to rapidly
introduce innovative products and more efficient business solutions.
The advantage depends on Cisco® employees’ ability to quickly
obtain IT infrastructure for new projects.
“In the past, data center infrastructure tended to be difficult to scale
and costly, affecting internal user satisfaction,” says Brian Cinque,
CITEIS solutions architect. Employees who requested IT
infrastructure for a project had to wait six to eight weeks while Cisco
IT engineers architected a solution, designed it, found a place to put
it, and then procured, installed, configured, and secured the
infrastructure. The long wait impeded business agility, affected user
satisfaction, and increased costs.
Cisco IT has successively accelerated infrastructure provisioning
and reduced the required IT effort. The first step was virtualizing as
much of the application environment as possible. By 2009, slightly
more than half of all applications in the Cisco enterprise had been
virtualized.
The next step was building a data center platform with a unified
fabric, based on the Cisco Unified Data Center platform. This
platform, which includes Cisco Unified Computing System™ and
Cisco Nexus® switches, has become the standard for all new
deployments at Cisco. (For more details, read the
“IT as a Service”
case study.) By early 2011, Cisco IT had virtualized 71 percent of
the applications in the Texas Metro Virtual Data Center (MVDC), all
of them on the Cisco Unified Computing System. The target is 80
percent virtualization by the end of 2012. “Virtualizing applications on the Cisco UCS® lowered server TCO by 61
percent and time to delivery from 6 to 8 weeks to 2 to 3 weeks,” says Cinque.
Then, in 2009, Cisco IT introduced the first version of CITEIS, which was internally coded. Cisco employees no
longer had to worry about server placement, procurement, installation, configuration, or security. Instead, they
used preconfigured workflows to automate server provisioning, including VMware and Cisco UCS Manager tasks.