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“This has helped us solve one of our biggest problems,” says McDonald, “which
is backend provisioning for new tenants, connecting all of the necessary storage,
computer, and network components. With Cisco UCS Director’s native management
of Cisco UCS, Nexus fabric, NetApp, and EMC storage, we can use the orchestrator
capability within Cisco UCS Director to create an automated workflow and then simply
execute it. We do not have to recreate every process every time.”
In addition to efficient automation, Cisco UCS Director creates consistency. “The
concern that people in my position have is that when you have many engineers who
are very hands-on with building virtualized environments on such a big cloud platform,
you can quickly lose control,” says Carter. “And that is a problem because consistency
is vital for providing high quality, reliable, cost-effective services. Cisco UCS Director
addresses that issue. It uses a model-based orchestration capability that enables
us to build repeatable provisioning.” workflows and templates without scripting. This
eliminates the variability associated with different people writing scripts in their own
way.”
Cisco UCS Director’s self-service catalog allows the Managed Solutions team
to create standardized workflows according to inhouse policies and procedures.
Customers can request new services from this catalog with Data
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3’s governance
already included. “We are able to create the appropriate policies and rules around
what they can and cannot provision, so we can protect our backend infrastructure,
while still giving customers enough functionality to service their own needs,” says
McDonald.
“When the company evaluated automation platforms, one of the many things that
set Cisco’s solution apart from others’ is the fact that customers can see both their
virtual and physical workloads,” says Carter. “When we host a dedicated blade for
a customer, it shows up in the customer’s dashboard view as well. Competitive
products could not manage the physical side of the infrastructure for a tenant.”
Results
Data
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3 went into production with Cisco UCS Director in January. They quickly
discovered that it reduced server provisioning time to minutes. “We focus on educating
customers on the importance of a service catalog and on setting expectations for their
businesses,” says Carter. “Through Data
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3’s Business Productivity Services team,
we will help customers put together service catalogs and help them automate that
catalog through a portal. Over time, the catalog can be used to provision a full range of
business technologies for end users, from mobile phones to new applications to user
rights and so on.”
“The ability to automate across multiple stacks is pretty visionary compared to what
was out there,” says McDonald. “We see Cisco UCS Director playing an important
role in enabling our customers to experiment with taking different workloads into
different clouds and assisting them in maintaining control of their infrastructures.”
The Managed Solutions team has access to a library of more than 400 built-in tasks
and out-of-the-box workflows, including Day 1 through Day 3 maintenance and
update activities. “Cisco UCS Director’s model-based orchestration and templating
allow us to automate and execute administrative and operation tasks in a matter of
minutes,” says McDonald. “The time savings is tremendous.”
Customer Case Study
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