Inside Cisco IT

Cisco IT is transforming itself to deliver IT As A Service (ITAAS), and this is changing the way we deliver all IT services internally, including our unified communications (UC) and video services. For the business, we offer transparent IT cost information and (over time) cost reduction, as well as…

If sibling rivalry exists among Data Centers, our Richardson, Texas facility must be jealous.  Unveiled in 2007 as Cisco’s next-generation Data Center and subsequently toured by thousands of visitors, the site hasn’t received much attention since its younger brother came online in 2011.…

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure or VDI is getting a lot of attention these days. It allows companies to replace high-cost laptops with a lower-cost, secure device. It also allows employees to access a secure, cloud-based desktop from any device across the Internet. Desktop virtualization has been pop…

One part of my job involves designing the virtualization model for our internal unified communications (UC) system deployments around the world. A critical task in this design is specifying which UC virtual machines (VMs) can share a Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) server chassis or blade…

Cisco IT continues to improve upon virtualization and cloud computing capabilities in its Allen, Texas data center. We have added new capabilities in recent months that improve the self-service features available to users. On the Cisco IT Elastic Infrastructure Services (CITEIS) platform, Cisco’s pr…

Two things I greatly enjoy about working in and around Data Centers are that so many different technologies converge within them and that those technologies are constantly evolving.  There’s always something new to explore. It’s no surprise then that Data Center Deconstructed ping-ponged among sever…

In thinking back over this past year and on the many, many conversations I’ve had with customers, I believe that mobility is really top of mind when it comes to all of the collaboration technologies available to us.  Over 80% of customers I’ve talked to are in the midst of developing their mobile de…

I use my desk phone only about once a day, but most callers still reach me on their first try. How is this possible? With Cisco Unified Mobility: Single Number Reach (SNR), a feature that allows me to control how incoming calls are sent to my desk, mobile, or soft phones. Although this SNR feature h…

In an earlier post, my colleague Reid Bourdet described how we migrated our largest Cisco Unified Communications Manager (Cisco UCM) cluster to a virtual machine environment running on Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) servers.  This was the 19-node (server) Cisco UCM cluster that serves th…