Cisco Domain Ten: The Compendium

It’s hard to believe but it’s ten months since I first blogged on Cisco Domain TenSM, which is Cisco Service’s framework to guide you on your path to data center and cloud transformation. I’ve now covered all ten domains of this concise and powerful model. I’ll now collect all articles – including my most Cisco Domain Ten article around the breadth of SDN adoption challenges – into this one article as a useful summary. So forgive the brevity and please do dive into the links/URLs for more information if indeed you missed these articles first time. And if you’ve read every article and watched our VoDs, please do let me know what you thought of the series – oh, and thanks!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZVO8meEOCo

Going back, now, I started in December 2012, with our launch of Cisco Domain Ten, where I set the focus for my series of articles as cloud transformation. Let me summarize each article with (and for those that know me you’ll know this is a struggle ) just one sentence with the key message from each blog/domain.

Cisco Domain Ten – Cisco Services Framework for Data Center Transformation

Domain 1: Facilities and Infrastructure – focuses on the need to design standardized, extensible infrastructure as the core building blocks of a flexible data center.

Domain 2: Virtualization and Abstraction – here I then noted that a hypervisor was a necessary but not sufficient addition to build a cloud. And that a virtualized abstraction layer is necessary to deliver flexibility to your business applications.

Domain 3: Automation and Orchestration – this is really what starts to differentiate a cloud from a traditional data center

Domain 4: The User Portal – empowers your end users to directly exploit the benefits of your automated, virtualized and modular data center.

Domain 5: Service Catalog and Management – I introduced the importance of the service catalog in ensuring your IT services are standardized, in essence both efficiently defined and effectively executed, and therefore economical to deliver.

Domain 6: Service Financial Management – specifically with showback and chargeback – helps you measure and monetize (respectively) your cloud’s financial benefit.

Domain 7: Platform – ensure you standardise and minimise the number of variations you have in operating system, patches, databases and middleware – and stop your operations teams troubleshooting on shifting sands!

Domain 8: Applications – the reason why you have a data center in the first place! – to deliver those software applications that run your business. So many of your data center decisions are taken in support of your applications layer.

Domain 9: Security and Compliance – security is absolutely fundamental to the continuing operation of your data center – and is wide ranging, from physical perimeter security to security between virtual machines running on the one compute host. And compliance, who is allowed to do what and so on is closely related.

Domain 10: Operations and Governance – Part (a) – don’t forget about the people and process issues when planning a data center change. It’s not just about the technology!

Domain 10: Operations and Governance – Part (b) – so important I wrote 2 blogs! I gave clear examples of problems you maybe experience in the operations management domain – where Cisco’s Data Center services for Operations Enablement could really help you.

And finally, I wrote up an application of Domain Ten to a non data center area, just to prove the broad applicability of the Cisco Domain Ten framework – SDN: Cisco Domain Ten tells us it’s not (just) about the Network.

I am sure this won’t be the last time I blog on Cisco Domain Ten. If this has whetted your interest, Cisco Services are ready to help you apply this innovative framework to your data center transformation plans and more generally to IT services challenges. Get in touch and let us help you make it happen! Thanks once again for following this particular service and please do let me know if you’ve found it interesting and insightful!