Application-centric infrastructure is set to help businesses in South Africa unlock new routes to innovation and profit, Cisco has announced.
“A new paradigm shift driven by cloud, mobility and big data is redefining IT, with the Web-based economy shifting to an app-based economy,” says Alpheus Mangale, MD, Cisco South Africa.
“Today’s data centre and cloud application and infrastructure requirements call for a new approach. We need solutions that are simple and that cut across different technological and organisational silos without compromising on scale, responsiveness, security and end-to-end visibility.
“We need solutions that deliver network automation and programmability, and we need models that are designed from the ground up to be explicitly application-centric. Bolted-on approaches are becoming a thing of the past, and the failure of companies to adapt will likely see them fall behind the competition in terms of profit and innovation.”
Directly responding to market demands, Cisco’s recently announced application-centric infrastructure (ACI) offering is set to have a particularly significant impact on data centres through ramping up the efficiency, flexibility and speed increasingly demanded by the region’s profit-conscious business-leaders.
Complemented by associated professional services and an open partner ecosystem, Cisco is now able to deliver the first data centre and cloud solution built around the needs of applications. The system offers full visibility, and integrated management of both physical and virtual networked IT resources.
Cisco’s bold launch comes as technology-focused market intelligence firm IDC predicts that service providers worldwide will continue to drive IT spend and will account for a quarter of the entire data centre space by 2016.
The complex pressures facing data centres was vividly highlighted in Cisco’s recent Global Cloud Index, which reported that annual global data centre IP traffic will reach 6.6 zettabytes by the end of 2016. By 2016, global data centre IP traffic will reach 554 exabytes per month (up from 146 in 2011), at a compound annual growth rate of 31%.
By 2016, nearly two-thirds of all data centre workloads will be processed in the cloud, with annual global cloud IP traffic rising to 4.3 zettabytes. This amounts to around 355 exabytes per month (up from 57 in 2011). Overall, cloud IP traffic will have grown at a CAGR of 44% from 2011 to 2016.
ACI will help businesses in the region adapt to such trends by combining innovations in software, hardware, systems and application specific integrated circuits (ASICS) with a dynamic, application-aware network policy model structured around open application programming interfaces (APIs).
The system can reduce application deployment from months to minutes by unifying physical and virtual networks and offering unprecedented security, compliance and real-time visibility at system, tenant, and application levels.
Furthermore, Cisco data centre switching innovations allow the network to rapidly respond to application development teams while delivering up to 75 percent total cost of ownership savings compared to merchant, silicon-based switches and software-only network virtualisation solutions.
“IT leaders want innovations that enable application automation for rapid deployment of infrastructure and dynamic adjustment to real-time events, integrated visibility with telemetry for performance monitoring and resilient recovery from failure. They also demand optimised performance across diverse applications needs with simplicity and control,” added Mangale.
ACI stands apart from current approaches, which are often operationally siloed, and with no common or policy operational model between application, network, security and cloud teams.
Cisco’s innovation also addresses other pressing issues such as static and inflexible security models, as well as the operational headache of multiple management points, proprietary licensing models, software version control issues, and consistency across multiple hypervisor environments.
Cisco’s ACI comprises the Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC), enhanced versions of the NX-OS operating system and the new Nexus 9000 portfolio.
The latter is the cornerstone of the ACI solution, and includes state-of-the-art system innovations such as the industry’s first backplane-free modular switch to provide investment protection, efficient power and cooling, and a simpler design that is twice as effective at improving meantime between failures.