Over the past decade, the data center has been steadily evolving. It’s transforming from a mega facility, filled with disparate infrastructure that’s difficult to integrate, maintain, and manage, into a more agile business response center. Businesses looking to refocus their IT efforts on delivering greater value are exploring ways to leverage automation to optimize utilization and minimize waste. While vendors promise automation ‘in the box’, many organizations struggle with the complexities of achieving a fully functional, automated data center environment. How do you plan for automation in terms of skills, policy, and processes? It’s important that businesses understand what ‘automation’ really means before setting off down this path. The definition of automation has changed over the last decade. Ten years ago, automation was almost exclusively about provisioning. It wasn’t unusual for businesses to have upwards of 70% of their resources focused solely on provisioning new storage and configuring logical unit numbers. Cloud has fundamentally changed our expectations of automation, and now it’s as much about deprovisioning.

Defining a policy relating to ‘what’ and ‘when’ to automate is a critical step. Is your goal to spin up resources to troubleshoot problems? Under what circumstances should you do so? Businesses looking to automate their data center environments often struggle to understand or anticipate the effects of multi tenancy. How much extra capacity do you need to provision to manage ‘spiky’ traffic, at different times of the day? This is where bringing in a seasoned cloud services provider can add value. During many years of providing cloud services to clients, they’ve developed consistent policies, and begin by implementing best practice. That’s not to say that a best practice approach is always right for every organization each has unique workloads and requirements, but it gives you a good starting point. Cisco Virtual Application Container Services™—offers single workflow automation to logically isolate virtual application workloads at the virtual layer. Provides VMware vSphere™ and Microsoft Hyper—V™ hypervisor support for interoperability across private cloud environments. Helps to enable a consistent provisioning and orchestration experience across physical and virtual assets through Cisco UCS Director™.

Data Center Automation Increasing Agility

Data Center automation is a vital step to achieving the business results you need to compete effectively. It automates IT processes across computing, network, and storage layers in physical and virtual environments. Data Center management and automation can give you the agility you need to act and achieve results faster. From infrastructure to applications, we can support the right data center automation strategy for your organization. Learn how to transform your business with Cisco Unified Computing System™ (UCS™) software modules, virtual application containers, and intelligent automation and systems management solutions for cloud. Automation isn’t just an option anymore; it’s a necessity. Explore data center management and automation today. Your data center is a critical part of your business strategy. The faster it produces results, the more competitive your business can be in a world that values speed. To reach the speed you need, your data center must be agile—it must be automated. Cisco UCS Performance Manager™—unifies performance monitoring and management of Cisco UCS™ integrated infrastructure solutions.

Processes Automation Agility

End users want to order applications in a self—service manner and take delivery within minutes. Application developers need automated delivery of standardized infrastructure resources to develop, test, and deploy applications. IT needs to deliver application workloads on demand in an automated and repeatable manner, eliminating manual provisioning or deprovisioning of resources. IAM provides automation modules that allow for assimilation at a pace that is comfortable for your organization. Start with infrastructure automation, and when you’re ready, expand your capabilities to enterprise and hybrid cloud or application automation. All modules work together and are operated using a common interface, which simplifies service life—cycle management. You can trust us for data center automation that gets your business where it needs to be, as fast as it needs to be there. Delivers real—time views of fabric and data center switch bandwidth usage and capacity thresholds. Discovers and creates a relationship model of each system, giving staff a single, accurate view of all components. Allows staff to navigate into individual Cisco UCS™ infrastructure components when troubleshooting and resolving issues.

Features And Benefits

Cisco UCS Central™—manages thousands of globally distributed Cisco UCS™ servers from a single management pane. Aggregates inventory and fault information across multiple Cisco UCS™ domains. Allows customers and partners to use XML API to integrate into higher level management solutions. Works in conjunction with Cisco UCS Manager™. Cisco UCS Director™—provides unified provisioning and life—cycle management across computing, network, storage, and virtualization layers. Replaces manual processes with unified automated workflows across physical and virtual resources. Integrates with Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure™ (ACI) and Cisco Virtual Application Container Services™ to deliver isolated infrastructure containers. Manages Cisco—based integrated infrastructure and third—party solutions. Cisco UCS Manager™ — Provides embedded, unified management that uses a policy based model to improve agility and reduce risk. Uses auto discovery to detect, inventory, manage, and provision system components as they are added or changed. Offers a comprehensive, open XML API that facilitates integration with third—party system management tools.