White Papers: Cisco

This play is primarily focused on the first step of helping the customer achieve Operational ROI; however, it is important that sales help the customer understand that by migrating from older telephony to IP they will enable their network to deliver collaborative services and benefits that will improve Productivity and Strategic ROI for their company, as well. Read more.

The information technology industry is undergoing one of the most significant periods of transformation in the last 20 years. This period of change is directed by a series of trends such as the explosive growth of powerful smartphones, the consumerisation of technology purchasing, and the move toward cloud-based software application delivery. Read more.

The data center has gone through several major evolutionary changes over the past several decades, and each change has been defined by major shifts in computing. The shift to a virtual data center will be the single biggest transition in the history of computing. This transition will reshape all the major data center tiers: applications, storage, servers and the network. This paper examines the drivers of this transition, provides real-world case studies and includes data centre fabric best practices.

Low cost servers, used for applications such as sales force automation and workgroup collaboration, had contributed to server sprawl, causing the data center to outgrow available power and cooling capacity. Server virtualisation helped but had begun to slow network performance. “We wanted 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity without the expense of building a new data center,” says Rory Regan, network and telecom manager, Coca-Cola Bottling Company Consolidated. “We decided to build a new data center network that would continue to work with our existing servers and storage as we gradually migrated to a unified fabric.” Read this case study