The connections between your business success and data center efficiency have never been clearer or stronger. Delivering data center resources quickly to capitalize on new business opportunities or projects is a major factor for business success. The only way to expedite resource delivery is by replacing manual processes with repeatable, best-practice-based automated service consumption and delivery.

So what is getting in the way?

The first problem is inconsistent delivery of standardized infrastructure instances. Many solutions on the market today only manage virtual resources while others just support their proprietary hardware stack. Automation needs to be across all layers -and that includes networks. I believe the only way to achieve the speed and efficiency businesses desire is to manage your entire heterogeneous data center as a unified whole - holistically.

The second problem is manual vs. on-demand service delivery. In many organizations, services are provisioned manually through trouble-tickets. This leads to long lead times and rework when mistakes are made. Long lead times translate into slow business response and higher costs.  Users want to consume services on-demand.  What services? Complete application stacks with predefined supporting infrastructure.

That's exactly what Cisco has provided. The recent release of Cisco Prime Service (PSC) delivers a modern, easy-to-use portal from which end users, developers or IT professionals can order consistent application stacks and their supporting infrastructure on-demand. Designed for a diverse range of users, Cisco PSC allows customers to order, consume and track the life cycle of their services quickly and easily.

How does it work? It starts with integration between Cisco PSC, UCS Director and Virtual Application Container Services (VACS).

Cisco UCS Director and VACS work together to provision complete infrastructure containers that span compute, network, storage and virtualization. These containers come with pre-defined network services that are saved as templates and ordered from Cisco PSC in a repeatable, consistent manner.  First time, every time. Using Cisco PSC developers, IT professionals or end users can order these infrastructure containers on-demand and have them available for use within minutes.

But just for Cisco, right?Wrong!

Cisco UCS Director supports not only UCS-based infrastructures but also multi-vendor infrastructure solutions so your entire data center can take advantage of holistic speed and efficiency.  How much speed? Refer to this blog on our most recent test results.

Expedite service delivery and respond to new business opportunities faster. Let your business benefit from Cisco's latest solution that delivers comprehensive automation and self-service delivery.

To learn more, visit:
Cisco Prime Service Catalog
Cisco Virtual Application Container Services
Cisco UCS Director