Lower Costs, Boost Network Resilience and Business Agility

Data centers provide a strategic opportunity for IT organizations to improve the efficiency, resilience, and responsiveness of the applications and information on which businesses depend.

Most enterprise data centers grew rapidly to meet the explosive economic growth of the 1990s. Applications were deployed in underutilized, isolated infrastructure silos, so that a typical data center often supports a broad assortment of operating systems, computing platforms, and storage systems. Because there is little sharing between infrastructure components, or across these silos, utilization rates are generally lower than desired, operational overhead is high, and resources cannot be repurposed to meet new requirements quickly enough.

According to analyst estimates (Forrester Group “Trends 2007: Retail IT” study), 78 percent of Retail IT budgets are dedicated to maintaining existing infrastructure rather than funding strategic new projects. Gartner also predicts that from 2006 to 2008, as many as half of all large data centers will need to undergo a major overhaul to address this growing challenge. IT organizations must improve the operational efficiency and utilization of data center resources, while releasing funds for new projects that generate revenue. At the same time, data center managers need a resilient infrastructure that protects applications and services against disruptions and security attacks, without introducing more risk into the network environment.

While the inclination is simply to consolidate infrastructure into larger facilities, many IT organizations are recognizing that this is merely a short-term solution. To address the underlying issues, they need to evolve incrementally to a new generation of data center architecture that can incorporate ongoing improvements in computer, storage, networking, and application technologies in a sustainable, cost-effective manner.

The Network as an Enabler

The data center network is increasingly recognized as a uniquely valuable asset that can provide a stable foundation for IT organizations to achieve their infrastructure goals. The network possesses many inherent qualities such as pervasiveness, transparency, scalability, and standards-orientation that make it ideally suited as a platform for hosting infrastructure services (such as firewalls, intrusion protection, data replication, server-less backup, and storage virtualization) while allowing incremental deployment and expansion to meet evolving requirements.

The Cisco Data Center Network Architecture (DCNA) enables your enterprise to build a more dynamic, agile, and virtualized infrastructure in an incremental and low-risk manner, using best-practice principles, guidelines, and blueprints that have been tested in labs and thousands of real-world deployments. Your business can take advantage of Cisco’s considerable experience to complement your existing network investments and expertise.

Employing state-of-the-art consolidation, virtualization, and automation technologies, Cisco DCNA solutions enable IT organizations to turn computing and storage resources from disparate, monolithic systems into a service-centric shared pool of resources consisting of standardized components that can be dynamically aggregated, provisioned, and accessed through an intelligent network. In this way IT organizations can address many of today's top operational challenges for data centers:

• Server and storage utilization
• End-to-end security enforcement
• Server proliferation
• Regulatory compliance
• Business continuance
• Power and cooling limitations

The goal is to create an agile infrastructure that helps your business achieve alignment between IT assets and business priorities, by meeting the following objectives:

• Lower total cost of ownership (TCO): Significantly lower capital costs through consolidation and higher utilization of previously separate resources. Also reduce operational expenses through simplification and automation of administrative tasks, and lower cooling and power costs.
• Greater business agility: Your IT staff can dynamically respond to changing business demands by facilitating rapid provisioning of application and infrastructure services from shared pools of consolidated computing, storage, and network resources. This helps streamline operational procedures and enable policy-driven control.
• Improved business resilience: IT staff can mitigate network disruptions or attacks by protecting infrastructure, applications, and data with the highest levels of availability, pervasive security, and business continuance.
• Improved service levels: Optimize business service levels by providing secure, accelerated access to data-center-hosted applications and information from anywhere, at any time, across your organization.

Together, these capabilities support ongoing innovation in the enterprise data center, enabling your business to address both short- and long-term demands, while providing a solid foundation upon which to evolve your data center infrastructure for the future.