Ranajoy Punja 

The heartbeat of any organization is in the data center. Employees, partners, and customers rely on data and resources stored there to effectively create, collaborate, and interact. Over the last decade, the rise of Internet and Web-based technologies has made the data center more strategic than ever, improving productivity, enhancing business processes, and accelerating change. Data centers are the strategic focus of IT efforts to improve the efficiency, resilience, and responsiveness of the applications and information on which the business depends.

Data center managers face several challenges in fulfilling these goals. Most enterprise data centers grew rapidly to meet the explosive economic growth of the previous decade. Applications were deployed in underutilized, isolated infrastructure silos, so that a typical data center must support a broad assortment of operating systems, computing platforms, and storage systems. Since there is little sharing between infrastructure components or across these silos, utilization rates are generally lower than desired, operational overhead is high, and resources cannot be repurposed to meet new requirements quickly enough.

According to analyst estimates (Gartner, 2005), 70 percent or more of IT budgets are dedicated to maintaining existing infrastructure, rather than funding strategic new projects. The analyst has also forecast from 2006 to 2008, as many as half of all large data centers will need to undergo a major overhaul to address this growing challenge. IT organizations must improve the operational efficiency and utilization of data center resources, while releasing funds for new projects that generate revenue. At the same time, data center managers need a resilient infrastructure that protects applications and services against disruptions and security attacks, while not introducing more risk into the equation.

While the inclination is simply to consolidate infrastructure into larger facilities, many IT organizations are recognizing that this is merely a short-term solution. To address the underlying issues, they need to evolve incrementally to a new generation of data center architecture that can incorporate ongoing improvements in computer, storage, networking and application technologies in a sustainable and cost-effective manner.

Providing a stable foundation
The data center network is increasingly becoming recognized as a uniquely valuable asset that can provide a stable foundation for IT organizations to achieve their infrastructure goals. The network possesses many inherent qualities such as pervasiveness, transparency, scalability, and standards-orientation that make it ideally suited as a platform for hosting infrastructure services (such as firewalls, intrusion protection, data replication, server-less backup and storage virtualization) while allowing incremental deployment and expansion to meet evolving requirements.

Cisco’s DCNA
The Cisco Data Center Network Architecture (DCNA) allows enterprises to build a more dynamic, agile and virtualized infrastructure in an incremental and low-risk manner, using best-practice principles, guidelines, and blueprints that have been tested in labs and thousands of real-world deployments, while taking advantage of their existing network investments and expertise.

Employing state-of-the-art consolidation, virtualization, and automation technologies, Cisco’s DCNA solutions enable IT organizations to turn computing and storage resources from siloed, monolithic systems into a service-centric shared pool of resources consisting of standardized components that can be dynamically aggregated, provisioned, and accessed through an intelligent network.

In this way, IT organizations can address many of today's top operational challenges for data centers: