brokering the cloud

2
Cisco and Intel partnering in innovation Peruse a list of the top 10 characteristics to look for in a financial broker and you’re bound to find “trustworthy” and “responsive.” When we invest money, we expect the experts to be quick to respond to market demands, to take a holistic view, and to manage our funds seamlessly. Compare that to the demands being placed on today’s CIOs and the two are increasingly similar. When a business unit submits a request for compute power, they expect fast, secure results, and they want the ability to ‘see’ how their server environment is performing. “CIOs are being asked to transition from being a resource provider to resource broker,” says Phill Lawson- Shanks, CTO at Virtacore, a wholly- owned subsidiary of IKANO Communications Inc., headquartered in Sterling, Va. “That means they need to adapt to a new service delivery paradigm that leverages internal, external, and hybrid cloud fabrics, where virtual instances and resource pools are both dynamic and manageable at an increasingly granular level,” he says. As a leading cloud services provider, Virtacore understands the intricacies of leveraging IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) to reduce capital costs and operating expenses. At the same time, the company realizes the need for speed, visibility, and increased manageability. Which is why it’s currently in the process of building a new core infrastructure with the Intel ® Xeon ® processor-based Cisco ® Unified Computing System (UCS), Cisco Nexus ® and Catalyst ® switches, Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (Cisco IAC), and a next-generation hybrid storage solution from Nimble Storage. Currently located in Equinix International Business Exchange data centers in Silicon Valley, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., Virtacore became the first cloud service provider to leverage Equinix Business Suites earlier this year. It is also among the first to be nominated to VMware’s vCloud Powered program, which requires partners to offer on-demand access to virtual infrastructure from a public cloud while supporting application and API portability between a customer’s internal data center and the VMware Powered Service of their choice. The move to a wholesale data center model coincides with the company’s migration to Cisco UCS ® and Nimble. Together, the two strategies are giving Virtacore the performance and visibility it needs to stay ahead of larger competitors, delivering broker-like services at an extremely cost- effective price, says Lawson-Shanks. “Before we started this migration it could take up to six weeks to deploy a customer’s cloud instance. Now we can deploy within a matter of hours,” he says, noting that proofs of concept run on the new core infrastructure in a production environment, allowing for a simple transition to a full service contract once customers are satisfied. “From our perspective, we’ve gained a block of resource we can carve up and deploy any which way we need. From a customer perspective, they get a real world experience of what the system is going to be from soup to nuts that helps to allay any reservations they may have,” he says. Two of the first Virtacore customers to migrate to the new cloud infrastructure include a large food distributor and a well-known software provider. Both are experiencing faster response times—almost double what they were experiencing previously—with the added advantage of confidence. As Virtacore engineer Matt Tedder explains, the new environment offers “a single pane of glass” management view that provides crucial information about processing speeds, memory, network availability, and storage, as well as built-in pre-emptive monitoring capabilities. Virtacore’s dynamic cloud infrastructure-as-a-service helps CIOs transition from resource provider to resource broker. Perspectives and Solutions Brokering the cloud Spring 2013 Unleashing IT

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Virtacore’s dynamic cloud infrastructure-as-a-service helps CIOs transition from resource provider to resource broker.

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Page 1: Brokering the Cloud

Cisco and Intel partnering in innovation

Peruse a list of the top 10 characteristics to look for in a financial broker and you’re bound to find “trustworthy” and “responsive.” When we invest money, we expect the experts to be quick to respond to market demands, to take a holistic view, and to manage our funds seamlessly.

Compare that to the demands being placed on today’s CIOs and the two are increasingly similar. When a business unit submits a request for compute power, they expect fast, secure results, and they want the ability to ‘see’ how their server environment is performing.

“CIOs are being asked to transition from being a resource provider to resource broker,” says Phill Lawson- Shanks, CTO at Virtacore, a wholly-owned subsidiary of IKANO Communications Inc., headquartered in Sterling, Va. “That means they need to adapt to a new service delivery paradigm that leverages internal, external, and hybrid cloud fabrics, where virtual instances and resource pools are both dynamic and manageable at an increasingly granular level,” he says.

As a leading cloud services provider, Virtacore understands the intricacies of leveraging IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) to reduce capital costs and operating expenses. At the same time, the company realizes the need for speed, visibility, and increased manageability.

Which is why it’s currently in the process of building a new core infrastructure with the Intel® Xeon® processor-based Cisco® Unified Computing System™ (UCS), Cisco Nexus® and Catalyst® switches, Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (Cisco IAC), and a next-generation hybrid storage solution from Nimble Storage.

Currently located in Equinix International Business Exchange data centers in Silicon Valley, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., Virtacore became the first cloud service provider to leverage Equinix Business Suites

earlier this year. It is also among the first to be nominated to VMware’s vCloud Powered program, which requires partners to offer on-demand access to virtual infrastructure from a public cloud while supporting application and API portability between a customer’s internal data center and the VMware Powered Service of their choice.

The move to a wholesale data center model coincides with the company’s migration to Cisco UCS® and Nimble. Together, the two strategies are giving Virtacore the performance and visibility it needs to stay ahead of larger competitors, delivering broker-like services at an extremely cost-effective price, says Lawson-Shanks.

“Before we started this migration it could take up to six weeks to deploy a customer’s cloud instance. Now we can deploy within a matter of hours,” he says, noting that proofs of concept run on the new core infrastructure in a production environment, allowing for a simple transition to a full service contract once customers are satisfied.

“From our perspective, we’ve gained a block of resource we can carve up and deploy any which way we need. From a customer perspective, they get a real world experience of what the system is going to be from soup to nuts that helps to allay any reservations they may have,” he says.

Two of the first Virtacore customers to migrate to the new cloud infrastructure include a large food distributor and a well-known software provider. Both are experiencing faster response times—almost double what they were experiencing previously—with the added advantage of confidence. As Virtacore engineer Matt Tedder explains, the new environment offers “a single pane of glass” management view that provides crucial information about processing speeds, memory, network availability, and storage, as well as built-in pre-emptive monitoring capabilities.

Virtacore’s dynamic cloud infrastructure-as-a-service helps CIOs transition from resource provider to resource broker.

Perspectives and Solutions

Brokering the cloud

Spring 2013Unleashing IT

Page 2: Brokering the Cloud

“Nimble offers the cleanest user interface we’ve seen from a storage product,” says Tedder. “From just a few sets of tabs, we can obtain a top-down view of everything.”

In the case of the food distributor, the first application to move to Virtacore’s Cisco UCS/Nimble platform was SharePoint, a mission-critical application which is performing better in the cloud than it did on a tier-one manufacturer’s blade infrastructure. For the software provider, the main advantage is being able to quickly spin up customer instances with a high degree of visibility.

“Latency is not an issue any more. It’s about the performance of the systems, installing them correctly and managing them appropriately,” notes Lawson- Shanks, adding that Virtacore is looking to capitalize on the scalability of Cisco UCS and Nimble CS series, as well as the self-service provisioning capabilities of Cisco IAC, to support future growth.

“We’re only limited now by the amount of power our hosting partners can provide us,” he says.

Complimentary consultation

For more information and to qualify for a personalized consultation on leveraging a joint Cisco UCS and Nimble Storage solution in your data center, visit the Resource Center at: www.UnleashingIT.com.

© 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco, the Cisco logo, Unified Computing System, UCS, Nexus, and Catalyst are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. To view a list of Cisco trademarks, go to this URL: www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. (1305)

Intel and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.

Spring 2013Unleashing IT