How Cisco IT Achieves Consolidation and Standardization in the Data Center

The need to manage and build isolated islands for each application cost Cisco IT too much in resources and flexibility, and a solution was required. Underutilization of resources is a major factor in high TCO. Like many enterprises, Cisco is challenged to control the costs and improve the inefficiencies of maintaining a number of nonstandard, siloed business application environments. Cisco is undertaking a radical data center redesign with the goal of creating a single high-performance computer-processing environment powering a wide range of applications and services, including security, application optimization, and management. Although the data center has not yet been fully realized, the foundational technologies are being established on the way toward complete decentralization, virtualization, and dynamic provisioning.