Save Tens of Millions the Cisco Way

Cisco has a bright new idea it modestly claims can save IT organizations up to tens of millions of dollars. So far, so good.

This new idea is actually a new corporate datacenter located down south in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, with what Cisco calls a "dual nature," meaning its primary purpose is application development, but it can turn on a dime and be transformed into a DR site for one or more of the company's global data centers. Now, onto the kicker.

This new dual-purpose facility may be unique, but it does not have to be exclusively unique to Cisco, because it can be replicated by "any IT organization," resulting in the mega-million-dollar savings.

Cisco says companies with mission-critical apps and data, which suggests enterprises of all sizes, typically maintain a separate datacenter for DR, which implies one of three tactics: build a separate datacenter (costing mega millions, which almost nobody wants to do these downsizing days), co-locate one (still an expensive hassle) or bring in a third-party to handle DR, which makes a lot of IT shops very nervous.

Cisco proposes the following path: Start out with its Unified Computing System (UCS) and Service Profiles. Service Profiles are the fundamental mechanisms by which the UCS models the necessary abstractions of server, storage, and networking. Add to that a heaping helping of its Nexus switches along with Cisco-developed practices and policies, and the result is a datacenter with a day-in, day-out focus on application development, plus a DR site based on "virtual datacenters" that are created within the physical datacenter. What could be easier?

The grand opening takes place next Tuesday, Sept. 13.

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 09/08/2011 at 12:48 PM