The Cisco® Virtualized Multi-Tenant Data Center (VMDC) 2.0 solution eliminates the cost of home grown development of orchestration systems and complexity of designing, integrating and verifying that all systems and tools work together. It integrates crucial components of the cloud, including the virtualized infrastructure building blocks (compute, storage, and network), service orchestration for automation and configuration management, and end-to-end security. Deploying Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) has been made easy with the Cisco VMDC solution, deploy now and enjoy the benefits.
The Cisco VMDC solution integrates solutions and technologies from various vendors in the ecosystem. It offers administrators the knowledge and best practices gleaned from our integration efforts to make it easier to build private clouds in which resources can be scaled and provisioned on demand.
Challenge
IT departments face several business challenges today, including:
• High capital and operating costs and overhead caused by constant need for resources and changing resource needs
• Low responsiveness to business needs because of complex IT operations
• Inefficient resource utilization because of dedicated physical infrastructure
• Longer deployment times because of the difficulty in scaling resources dynamically
• Reduced automation and higher operational expenditures because of the difficulty in integrating all operational components of the data center
Business Benefits
IT departments can use the Cisco VMDC solution to build private clouds that confer benefits such as:
• Agile IT service delivery
• Rapid provisioning
• Reduced deployment time
• Higher server and storage utilization
• Lower power and cooling costs
• Reduced capital expenditures (CapEx) and operating expenses (OpEx)
• Up to 35% less expenditure to scale resources
• Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO)
Cisco VMDC Solution
This Cisco VMDC solution (Figure 1) is a modular, secure, multi-tenant data center architecture that uses Vblocks defined by the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition1. The architecture specifies two PoD ("point of delivery") sizes, large PoDs and compact PoDs, which differ in compute and storage scalability as well as access- and aggregation-layer design to meet the scalability requirements for different sizes of data centers. The compact PoD includes 64 servers, and the large PoD includes 512 servers. The design for both the compact and the large PoDs provides the capability to incrementally scale resources by adding multiple such PoDs to the system.
Figure 1. Cisco VMDC Simplified System Network Diagram:
The main benefits of the solution include:
• Virtualization-aware resources enabled by the Cisco Nexus® Family, Cisco MDS 9000 Family, and Cisco Unified Computing System™ platforms for efficient resource utilization
• Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Firewall Services Module (FWSM) and Cisco Application Control Engine (ACE)
Storage
• Fabric: Cisco MDS 9500 Series Multilayer Directors and Cisco MDS 9100 Series Multilayer Fabrics Switches
• SAN and network-attached storage (NAS) arrays (EMC and NetApp)
Orchestration and management
• BMC Atrium Orchestrator and BMC BladeLogic for server and network
• BMC Remedy IT Service Management Suite
• VMware vCenter
• Cisco UCS Manager
Why Cisco?
Numerous Cisco and ecosystem vendor technologies are interwoven to form the foundation of an end-to-end cloud infrastructure. Cisco's integration efforts allow administrators to use knowledge and best practices to ease their design and deployment processes. This solution reduces the need for network administrators to validate the entire architecture from the beginning, which saves time and money.
