John Manville, Cisco's VP of IT Network and Data Center Services speaks at Oracle OpenWorld 2009 in San Francisco

Running in the never-ending expansion race, technology giant Cisco’s business model is constantly morphing. A key enabler of the company’s transformation is its IT department.

“One of the mission statements in Cisco is that we lead the business with IT,” said Cisco’s VP of IT Network and Data Center Services John Manville.

Today, Cisco IT is under pressure from application development and business units to increase productivity. “They think we’re too expensive sometimes,” he said at the Oracle OpenWorld 2009 conference in San Francisco on Monday.

There is pressure to tighten up the division’s SLA’s, increase availability and reduce provisioning time. There is also pressure to drive up utilization of CPU, storage and network assets inside its data centers. And not unlike others, Cisco is having power and cooling issues.

In responding to these pressures, the organization is consolidating its data centers, relying heavily on virtualization enabled by the Unified Computing System.

Cisco’s own cloud
Cisco IT is planning to fundamentally change the way it delivers its services. The division will be ran as a business, acting effectively as a service provider to business users within and outside the company.

At the end of October, it will roll out its first internal cloud, called CITEIS, or Cisco IT Elastic Infrastructure Services. It is centered around UCS and uses software by Cisco and by some of its partners. CITEIS will provide software, platform and infrastructure as services.

The company projects that the internal cloud’s total cost of ownership will be about “25 percent of a pre-UCS, pre-cloud virtualized environment.” In Manville’s opinion, that figure validates both the UCS and the cloud construct.

In addition to the internal cloud, Cisco is planning to leverage external cloud services to handle spikes in capacity demand. During the next 12 months Cisco IT plans to undertake a “proof of concept” by moving a workload from CITEIS to an external cloud.

Consolidating data centers and improving resiliency
The company has about 50 data centers globally, including development facilities. Some of them are IT closets. Manville is looking at 20-25 data centers after consolidation, including building a few new ones to support better resiliency – also an increasingly growing need.

Boosting resiliency means raising infrastructure redundancy within the data centers, switching to multi-site active-active architecture and moving out of high-risk areas like the earthquake-prone Bay Area. An interim 1-MW data center Cisco is building in a Texas colocation facility acts as one of these active-active topologies and as one of UCS testing grounds.

Cisco IT’s UCS deployments
Cisco announced UCS in March of this year. About 77 percent of CIO’s that responded to a recent survey conducted by the Swiss bank UBS said they were planning to buy or evaluate UCS within the next year-and-a-half, according to a Reuters report.

“I think this is a great validation point to show that the UCS is here, it’s getting traction and Cisco data centers are soon planned to be filled with UCS environments,” Manville said.

Cisco has had some production applications running on UCS since the day of the March announcement, including legal and finance applications and the company CEO John Chambers’ research materials and PowerPoint presentations. The company has successfully tested several Oracle applications on the system.

“Sometimes I’m asked: ‘John, the ERP environment is not running on (UCS).’ And that’s true, but John Chambers’ environment is pretty mission-critical to me and if that goes down I hear about it pretty soon afterwards.”

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