The United States government's E-Gov initiative established the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) program to build a business-driven information technology (IT) blueprint for the federal government. The FEA provides a common language and framework to describe and analyze IT investments, enhance collaboration, and ultimately transform the federal government into a citizen-centered, results-oriented, and market-based organization. FEA initiatives will drive the development of next-generation federal IT architectures.
Cisco, in response to the FEA and to enterprise IT initiatives throughout public and private industry, developed the Cisco Service-Oriented Network Architecture (SONA). Cisco SONA is an architectural framework that promotes the ongoing evolution toward an Intelligent Information Network (IIN) to accelerate applications, business processes, productivity, and profitability.
Cisco SONA establishes architectural guidelines to help federal organizations evolve their IT infrastructures toward the FEA vision-to become the cornerstone for the design, development, and implementation of information resources government wide. The FEA takes advantage of industry best practices such as the enterprise architectures within Cisco SONA to transform government business processes with network investments that increase organizational agility, efficiency, and productivity.
The FEA Infrastructure Optimization Initiative (IOI) further refines the opportunities for IT infrastructure consolidation and optimization. A key area of focus in the IOI is the data center. With the Cisco SONA framework as a base, Cisco provides a standards-based data center networking architecture that enables federal organizations to build efficient and adaptive infrastructures. The Cisco Data Center Network Architecture creates a foundation upon which federal IT executives can better align data center resources with mission priorities. Cisco's architectural approach complements the FEA vision and facilitates the IOI by establishing a road map for federal data center evolution.
The Cisco Data Center Network Architecture integrates the Network Infrastructure Services and Application Networking Services that make up the next-generation federal enterprise data center. This paper discusses the evolution and future direction of federal data center architectures in the context of Cisco SONA and the Cisco Data Center Network Architecture.
