Like many IT departments, Cisco® IT historically dedicated a single server to each application or instance. However, this general approach created an explosion in the number of servers to be purchased, deployed, and managed. As of early 2007, Cisco IT had nearly 4000 applications running on more than 11,000 servers, with a growth rate of 15 percent per year.

Supporting this many servers meant Cisco IT needed to address the challenges of high costs, limited data center space, and high demand and environmental impacts for expensive electrical power and air conditioning. Perhaps most importantly, the difficulties of deploying physical servers resulted in long lead times for bringing these resources to production (12 weeks and more), which created a significant negative impact on application development projects.

To address these challenges, Cisco IT has created virtual servers that run multiple applications on a single physical server. Cisco IT currently uses the VMware ESX product for server virtualization along with Cisco routing, switching, load balancing, content switching, and storage-area networking (SAN) technologies for connecting servers across the Cisco network.

Server virtualization is also a key characteristic of a Service-Oriented Data Center (SODC), which allows computing, network, and storage resources to be dynamically partitioned, provisioned, and assigned to different applications through an intelligent network fabric.

The change to virtual servers is producing ongoing benefits for Cisco, including a cumulative US$10 million in cost savings and cost avoidance, lower demand for data center space and resources, and reduced server deployment effort and cycle time. “When virtual servers can be installed rapidly, development projects can be completed very quickly, which allows Cisco IT to complete more internal requests for application enhancements, accelerate application development, and benefit from general agility in our computing infrastructure,” says Mike Matthews, Cisco IT program manager for server virtualization.

Cisco IT determined that slightly more than half of its existing servers were viable candidates for reconfiguration as virtual servers. Based on this assessment, Cisco IT has identified the goals of virtualizing 50 percent of existing servers and 75 percent of newly deployed servers.

Cisco IT has been preparing for two major data center developments that will begin in late July and continue through 2008. The first is consolidation of all Cisco North America production data centers into a new facility located in Richardson, Texas, which will provide ample space for future expansion. The second is deployment of the new Cisco VFrame DC provisioning software solution, which will greatly enhance how Cisco IT manages servers, storage, and other I/O resources to create virtual computing services end to end in the data center.

For More Information

Cisco on Cisco
Cisco IT Data Center Server Virtualization Case Study
Cisco IT Trends in IT: Data Center Server Virtualization
Cisco IT Data Center Solutions