The world of enterprise IT is changing rapidly. The impact of this change extends far beyond the confines of the data center. Agile software development, DevOps and evolving cloud consumption models are today shaping the way in which IT services will be delivered in the future. They also call for new processes and skills.
There are two key reasons why automating in your data centre will be vital to managing the rapid evolution we’re seeing in IT and keeping your competitive advantage in the digital economy:
Silos in your data center
Traditional data center design only partially fulfills the needs of modern enterprise IT. The full stack of network, server, storage and virtualization includes many management points. They are typically operated using different management tools, and often by different teams. The result is that as much as 77 percent of your administrative costs go to deployment, monitoring, updating and troubleshooting – not to activities that add new value to your business.
Static IT budgets
The number of scheduled applications is forecast to increase by 26% over the next 2 years. Meanwhile, IT Budgets are expected to remain static over the same period. In order to address this paradox, IT leaders need automation to reduce the time their teams spend on manual, repetitive tasks.
Bring IT together
Converged or hyperconverged platforms provide the first step in addressing the mismatch between IT infrastructure and the need for greater speed, efficiency and agility. These technologies fuse compute and storage (converged), or compute, storage and network (hyperconverged) into a single appliance. One that comes pre-configured, tested and supported end-to-end.
What’s more, with the right platform in place, it’s possible to deliver the majority of your core IT infrastructure through a single management tool with point-and-click simplicity.
Cisco launched the world’s first in 2009. Based on standard x86 technology, UCS was, and still is a recognised game-changer. It’s one that significant others have yet to replicate successfully. But we didn’t stop at UCS. We’ve continued to innovate in the form of HyperFlex. The next generation of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) built on UCS and the only complete HCI system available today.
UCS makes modernising and automating your data center simple. It comes with comprehensive infrastructure management and orchestration capabilities that reduce costs and help transform your business.
The latest version of Cisco UCS Director (UCSD) for example, delivers a dramatic reduction in the number of different management points in the overall stack. It will not only reduce complexity, but also improve time to market. You can roll out new workloads quickly and flexibly through a self-service portal – irrespective of whether you are provisioning on physical or virtual (hypervisor) infrastructure.
Watch the webinar on demand about UCS Director use cases
More use cases with UCSD 6.5
The latest releae of UCSD (version 6.5) features a self-service portal and guarantees high-performance from your infrastructure, with the user interface for admin programmed in HTML 5. What’s more, it not only enables you to manage basic infrastructure tasks, but also advanced use cases such as native Powershell integration, data center-wide vMotion automation and much more.
A good analogy we use is to think of UCSD as a chef, who combines all of the necessary ingredients, in the right measure, to serve the perfect meal (watch our video to see how).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dj1oehpOzSE
With the digital economy in full swing and the arrival of cloud-native and big data applications, automation for applications such as Hadoop and big data workloads is essential. Cisco UCS Director Express for Bigdata 3.5 supports all major Hadoop and big data applications such as Cloudera, MapR, Hormonworks and Splunk, as well as Apache Kafka and Apache Spark.
Stay tuned more to come soon.
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