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Service providers will be differentiated by the service catalog offered to their IaaS customers. Their success will be

measured by the number of end-customer deployments on their infrastructure, and therefore, in order to attract as
many customers as possible, service providers will need to support all the end customers’ different application

needs and underlying virtual data center types.

Experience shows that end customers have different ways to logically build their virtual data centers, depending on

their application needs. The physical topology of the hosting facility is however built very much the same. The

physical hardware chosen for such a facility might have different resource capacity and different feature sets, but

the interconnects of those physical devices in a point of delivery (PoD) are made according to best practices and

are well known; PoD is the collection of certain sets of physical network devices, physical compute nodes, storage

arrays, and application components that work together to deliver IaaS virtual resources.

Per the total virtual resources scale needs, Cisco offers different types of PoDs (see Figure 7 for a typical

example). Those hardware resources can be coupled into well-defined consumable types, making the design

easier, more reliable, predictable, and scalable.

Experience shows that managing and assuring both virtual and physical VDC components using a single unified

resource management platform is crucial for successful cloud services.

Just like the virtual platforms, the physical infrastructure, including network, network-based services, compute, and

storage will be shared among tenants - creating a shared multitenant environment. Security is important in the

multitenant environment as sharing physical resources increases the risk of one or more tenants negatively

affecting other tenants. With well-designed and secure architecture, these risks can be mitigated and tenants can

enjoy the same benefits of dedicated physical infrastructure.

Figure 7. An Example of a Common Cisco PoD