What Is Cisco UNIFIED FABRIC? Why Should You Care?

Is your network ready to help you transform and be the strategic partner that you can be? Let’s face it… Today’s data centers are challenged with siloed resources and facilities… Limited scalability… Poor resource utilization… Growing complexity…Perhaps the biggest challenge is time. When 80% of your resources are dedicated to “keeping the lights on” and managing all what you have, there is very little time left for innovation that benefits the business.

And the reality is that the role of IT has to change – from a cost center to a business strategic partner! Why? Because there are increasing demands on IT to help your business differentiate in order to survive and grow in these rough economic conditions. And let’s not forget that the increasing cost pressures, technology changes, and the advent of game-changers like cloud are forcing IT executives to look at how to deliver IT differently.

These growing demands put even more pressure on the shoulders of IT especially given the current state of your Data Centers. The data center network sits at the core of IT and is key to how IT can deliver services and provide value back to the business.

So what do you do? The good news is that …

… This is where Cisco provides tremendous value. Our strategy is to help our customers evolve away from silos, and help evolve your people, processes, and technologies so that you actually can deliver IT as a service and best take advantage of the trends in the data center.

https://youtu.be/bH-wcpUTzF4

The Cisco Unified Fabric provides an architectural approach to address these challenges and enables the next generation data center for scalable virtualization, seamless workload mobility and cloud computing, while reducing complexity and inefficiencies. This unique approach can help you redefine the economics of your IT operations, so you can spend more of your resources on delivering innovation to your business.

CISCO UNIFIED FABRIC DELIVERS ARCHITECTURAL FLEXIBILITY and CHOICE

A key building block for general-purpose, virtualized and Cloud-based data centers, Cisco Unified Fabric provides the foundational connectivity and unifies storage, data networking and network services, enabling CIOs and IT to address the challenges of the data center in a comprehensive and complete manner.

Cisco Unified Fabric delivers architectural flexibility, scalability, intelligence and consistent networking across physical, virtual and cloud environments enabling IT as a service model for quickly meeting ever-increasing business demands. Cisco Unified Fabric portfolio offers the broadest data center LAN and SAN switching and integrated services portfolios in the industry spanning from the Hypervisor to the data center core, consisting of Nexus and MDS portfolios along with Layer 4 to 7 solutions and provides our customers with:

• Financial efficiencies and investment protection achieved through consolidation, multi-protocol solutions and single point of management for LAN and SAN enabling an evolutionary adoption without disruption to existing infrastructure and operations

• Business and IT agility achieved through flexible and highly available secure fabric that supports dynamic resource allocation, changing traffic patterns, complex workloads and industry-leading simultaneous scalability within and across data centers

• Simplified operations achieved through embedded virtualization-aware policy-based security and intelligent consistent services directly into the network fabric, resulting in application acceleration, seamless and efficient general-purpose, converged, virtualized and cloud environments

BOTTOM LINE IS THIS…

Some of the world’s largest data centers run on Cisco Unified Fabric – Nexus and MDS portfolios. And there is a reason for that! Unlike other vendors in the industry, Cisco Unified Fabric delivers revolutionary scale, flexibility, intelligence and convergence, enabling your data center to be a more agile, cost effective and efficient environment, freeing up your IT staff to concentrate on taking care of initiatives that really matter to the business and increasing your bottom line!

To learn more about Cisco Unified Fabric, Nexus and MDS Switches, please visit Unified Fabric website.

Stay tuned… In my next blog, I will take you thru the journey to delivering IT As A Service.