2 25008 domain_ten11.29.12_v2_opt

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 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 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.

© 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.


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).


Cisco provides a complete architecture platform designed specifically to support
virtualization in the data center. Cisco Unified Data Center changes the economics
of the data center by unifying compute, storage, networking, virtualization, and
management into a single platform. This is designed to increase operating effi-
ciencies, simplify operations, and provide business agility—essential for deploying
IT 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.


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


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.


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 the
network, allowing administrators to manage virtual machines and physical servers
the same way, providing massive scalability along with uncompromised security,
visibility, and control.


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 changes
and 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


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.


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


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.


User Portal

Figure 1: Example of a user portal interface


User Portal
It is important to thoughtfully consider the usability of the portal; together with
domains 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


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


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.


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


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.


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


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


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.


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.


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.

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.

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.


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


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


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.


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


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.


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.


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.


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.


figure 3


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


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.


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



figure 4: Click image to activate demo


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.


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 Services
Cisco Virtualization Services
Cisco Desktop Virtualization Services


Cloud
Welcome 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.


2 25008 domain_ten11.29.12_v2_opt

2 25008 domain_ten11.29.12_v2_opt

Recommandé

Recommandé

Contenu connexe

Tendances

Tendances (17)

En vedette

En vedette (15)

Similaire à 2 25008 domain_ten11.29.12_v2_opt

Similaire à 2 25008 domain_ten11.29.12_v2_opt (20)

Dernier

Dernier (20)

2 25008 domain_ten11.29.12_v2_opt