Cisco Cisco DWDM Transceiver Modules White Paper
© 2016 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
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Concurrent with the challenges of adapting to these changes in the IT industry is the continued challenge for IT to
do more with flat or decreasing budgets. This confluence of factors has caused IT managers to become eager to
identify and adopt new technologies and solutions that deliver efficiency for those maintenance activities that are
consuming more than three-quarters of staff time. The goal of IT managers is to deliver excellent maintenance
service with less staff effort and increase the focus on deployment of new services for the organization. This trend
is the focal point of evolving data center strategy. Therefore, enterprises are seeking data center solutions that
deliver on the efficiency promises of unified infrastructure and management products.
The adoption of converged infrastructure solutions, such as Cisco
®
Unified Fabric and Cisco Unified Computing
System
™
(Cisco UCS
®
), has been increasing because converged infrastructure that spans computing, networking,
and storage resources can improve IT agility, protect business investments into the future, streamline deployment,
and significantly increase asset utilization. Converged infrastructure helps reduce floor space needs and energy
costs and provides operation benefits by creating a virtualized pool of resources. However, the real reduction in the
total cost of ownership (TCO) occurs when converged infrastructure is combined with end-to-end, simplified,
automated management.
Automation and programmability capabilities in the components of the data center - computing, networking,
storage, and services resources - enable this end-to-end automated management. A modern network device, be it
a switch or a router or a service appliance, has to support a wide range of automation features and provide robust
APIs for external tools, both off-the-shelf and custom-built, to be able to automatically provision network resources,
provide bandwidth allocation and latency guarantees to support network service-level agreements (SLAs), and
monitor the network for performance and compliance needs.
This document describes the various use cases for network automation and programmability and discusses the
features of the Cisco Nexus
®
9000 Series Switches that enable these use cases.
IT as a Service
IT is increasingly being delivered as a service, with private cloud models, to provide the speed, flexibility, and
competitive innovation needed by modern businesses. IT as a service (ITaaS) aims to achieve these goals:
●
Accommodate rapid business growth without adding IT staff.
●
Standardize the IT environment while providing the capability to expand the size, scope, and scale of
services delivered to customers.
●
Increase the customer base and global presence as a result of the nimbleness and agility of the IT
environment.
●
Increase collaboration among the development and IT teams, resulting in new automation use cases to
foster even greater innovation.
ITaaS typically is implemented in several phases.
Private Cloud
The first phase of ITaaS implementation requires several building blocks:
●
Self-service portal and standardized menu of services
●
Service-delivery automation
●
Operation-process automation
●
Resource-management automation
●
Service lifecycle automation