Cisco: Service Catalog is Critical to Private Cloud Strategy

Last I attended a very interesting live webcast with John Manville, VP of IT networks and data center services for Cisco, on their implementation of a private cloud, CITIES--Cisco IT Elastic Infrastructure Services. (The webcast is not available but the slides are.)

There are two things I took away:

1. Cisco has similar challenges to other large IT shops.
2. The IT Front Office is central to their internal cloud deployment of CITIES

First, the picture below shows their internal adoption phases.

 The roadmap has several phases, starting with MIST and going all the way to CUMULUS, each phase taking 4-6 months. In that sense it's both aggressive and pragmatic. If you see the bottom phases, it's where self-service and service catalog show up as basic enabling infrastructure.

1. Self-service requests and request catalog is pretty central to their internal adoption of virtualization. This encompasses:
2. Basic requests for Virtual machines
3. Bare metal requests
4. Service level and access control requests
5. Full service catalog integrated with other operations.
6. Integration with orchestration.

In the blue boxes, the outcomes for each phase are listed. From these outcomes, requirements can be derived for this "front office" infrastructure. For example, the first phase includes automated provisioning of virtual machines (VMware). This means that the catalog will need to have both a marketing front end and a back end that connects to vCenter or another management platform.

Later on, the catalog will track consumption, subscription in order to report SLA and cost allocation. Every one of the bullet points in the blue boxes needs corresponding Front Office functionality.

During the webinar John was asked:  How important is a self-service catalog?  He said,  "It's critical to CITIES. We are moving to a service oriented framework. The service catalog is a major part of that."

I have now seen more than a few plans for data center virtualization, and all of them have some sort of catalog and self-service in them.  What I like about Cisco's is that they are pretty clear the catalog is as important as a hypervisor if you are to achieve the economic impact of private clouds.

Second, the slide below shows the business pressures and operational realities that result in the typical IT squeeze.

This is another way to view the typical pressures newScale IT customers face from the business.

The goal of CITIES is to deliver operational efficiency and flexibility at a lower cost than today. Their goal for virtualizaton is that as of August any x86 request will go virtual, and the all refreshes will go on UCS. So over the next 2-3 years they'll be 70-80% virtualized. This is very aggressive goal: most companies have about 15% of capacity delivery by virtual servers.

When asked what was exciting about creating this private cloud, they said, "I'm excited about not getting beat up for lacking capacity." I love this quote!

I don't think most people building virtual data centers get the depth of requirements and work building that Cloud Front Office yet.  It's not only a technical problem, but a business model change as well.