Service providers deliver new cloud services more quickly and offer
superior customer experience with the help of Cisco Application
Centric Infrastructure
SAN JOSE, Calif., April 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE)
-- Providing secure, differentiated and rapidly delivered cloud
services to customers is a crucial requirement for today's service
providers. To meet cloud infrastructure demands, global
service providers are increasingly turning to the
Cisco® Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco
ACI(TM)), the industry-leading software-defined networking
(SDN) solution. Cisco ACI reduces operational costs with an
automated, policy-based programmable architecture, while improving
scalability and security. In addition, new Cisco ACI multi-site
management capability helps service providers to connect and manage
multiple geographically distributed Cisco ACI fabrics and to move
and manage workloads with a single pane of glass.
Cisco ACI is being deployed worldwide by service
providers such as NTT Communications (United States), T-Systems
(Germany), Hosters (Denmark), scanplus GmbH (Germany), Tieto Oyj
(Finland), and Ritter (United States).
NTT
Communications
NTT Communications (NTT Com) is a subsidiary of NTT Group and a
20-year IT service provider veteran. The U.S. division
of NTT Com recognized a market opportunity to better serve the
enterprise market with a portfolio of managed service offerings
tailored to key vertical markets that would also meet compliance
mandates and regulations.
To succeed in this new direction, NTT Com decided
to transform its data centers with a focus on greater security and
performance. NTT Com selected Cisco ACI because it offered a much
more agile management model over competing industry
solutions. NTT Com can now quickly set up highly complex data
center domains, bringing new customers onboard in as little as
three days, and the security policies inherent in Cisco's SDN
solution also support the compliance needs of its
customers.
"Cisco ACI means applications guide the way the
network acts, not the other way around," says Indranil Sengupta,
vice president of product engineering at NTT Com. "We're able
to offer an outstanding customer experience with fewer errors and
up to 80 percent better application performance."
T-Systems
With operations in more than 20 countries and
multi-billion euro revenues, T-Systems, based in Germany, is one of
the world's leading providers of information and communications
technology. Increasingly T-Systems midsize customers are
requesting new services based on cloud services and innovative
business models, such as data analytics, the Internet of Things,
machine-to-machine communications, and industrial Internet.
T-Systems selected Cisco ACI to provide its customers with tailored
infrastructure, platforms, and software solutions.
"Our customers want high quality services,
uncompromised security, and flexibility, all at a reasonable
price," says Andreas Schwall, Delivery Executive Production
Midmarket at T-Systems. "Our challenge was to reduce IT effort and
maintenance-based outages, while improving capacity at the network
and security layer."
In addition, Cisco ACI allows T-Systems to run
more agile, flexible operations and open up new security offerings
for customers. "Based on open APIs and an application-centric view
of our landscape, we can reduce lead times during the onboarding
process and rapidly add more services to our portfolio," adds
Schwall.
Now application traffic steers the network, rather
than the other way around, enabling T-Systems to build the network
environment around different customer applications, significantly
improving performance and better meeting requirements.
Optimizing software-defined automation has reduced manual tasks by
90%, providing a productivity gain equivalent to three full-time
employees.
Hosters
Hosters, located in Denmark, is a certified Microsoft Azure Managed
Service Provider offering cloud and hybrid solutions. The
company turned to Cisco ACI to reduce time to market and to provide
customers with the right solution easily and quickly.
Security was also an important consideration, and Hosters worked
with Fortinet and Cisco ACI to ensure the highest levels of
security for customers. Cisco ACI is now operating in three
Hosters data centers and baby spines, and the company is planning
to upgrade its data centers to 100GbE, made easier with the Cisco
ACI deployment.
"The results of the Cisco ACI deployment have
exceeded our expectations," said Thomas Raabo, CTO, Hosters.
"Our deployment time of new services to customers has been cut down
from weeks to hours, and we are spending less time on systems
integration and more time on innovation. We're moving to a
DevOps model of continuous improvement, and we're creating agility
and value that can be passed along to our customers."
scanplus
GmbH
As a leading provider of managed cloud services in Germany,
scanplus delivers to Deutsche Telekom business customers
carrier-grade cloud services with rock-solid service level
agreements throughout Europe. scanplus wanted to provide Deutsche
Telekom customers with a "cloud in a box" that offered options and
full automation and delivery through a self-service portal.
scanplus chose Cisco ACI to address these needs, and will also
benefit from a network fabric that scales to multiple sites, with
single pane-of-glass management and automation. Because
scanplus is supporting a large number of business customers in a
shared cloud environment, data protection and strict tenant
segmentation are essential. Designed for secure
multi-tenancy, Cisco ACI makes it possible for applications and
users to share the same infrastructure without leaking information
across tenant boundaries.
"With Cisco ACI, we have full segmentation of each
tenant, and can also reference other tenant objects within a tenant
while maintaining isolation, which makes them private, separated,
and highly secure," said Stefan Daiber, head of architecture at
scanplus.
Using Cisco ACI multi-site functionality, scanplus
is also in the process of extending its network fabric to multiple
data centers. Because the solution works with any vendor's
hypervisor, it can easily accommodate the different systems in each
location.
"The openness of Cisco ACI is a big benefit," said
Daiber. "It doesn't just support any hypervisor, but also all
of the network equipment surrounding the hypervisor. It gives
us a tremendous amount of choice and flexibility."
Tieto Oyj
Tieto Oyj, headquartered in Finland, is a Nordic software and
services company. Tieto has deployed Cisco ACI as a
Layer 2 fabric in six data centers in three countries.
Tieto's growth strategy is to shift from providing basic services
to also delivering an outstanding experience for its customers.
That means being able to deliver services quickly and making it
possible to build anything on the application level that a customer
wants-without being hindered by the underlying physical
infrastructure.
Tieto selected Cisco ACI solution to ensure a
holistic architecture with centralized automation and policy-driven
application profiles. Using the Cisco ACI unified policy model, the
team enforces policy through endpoint groups (EPGs), a collection
of network endpoints that includes a wide range of entities,
including bare-metal servers, virtual machines, and containers.
"Cisco ACI provides a foundation that we can build
on to channel innovation into new services," said Juha Syrjänen,
Head of Connectivity Services Business at Tieto. "We'll be able to
quickly and efficiently deliver basic connectivity services, while
building a new connectivity ecosystem between our customers, their
other partners, and Tieto."
Ritter
Communications
Headquartered in the United States, Ritter Communications serves
more than 45,000 customers in rural Arkansas and Tennessee with
advanced voice and data services typically only found in major
metropolitan areas. Although Ritter Communications has
provided local phone service since 1906, sheer connectivity doesn't
deliver the revenues it once did. Ritter needed to deliver a
new set of business-focused cloud services to drive revenue
growth. But Ritter had limited operational experience with
cloud services, and so did its customers.
"We serve a very rural market, and many network
managers are tied to their servers. They wouldn't feel
comfortable putting everything in the public cloud," said Greg
Sunderwood, vice president of engineering at Ritter
Communications. "We wanted more differentiation on the
front end and more control on the back end."
Ritter's Hosted Solutions team found the answer in
Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform.
The integrated solutions feature a combination of Cisco ACI,
Windows Azure Pack, and Cisco Unified Computing Systems
(UCS®).
"We essentially pull the public cloud into a
customer's environment," says Brandon Fergerson, senior cloud
engineer at Ritter Communications. "Microsoft Azure is the
customer-facing management console, and Cisco ACI handles back end
infrastructure and network management."
The Hosted Solutions team has gone from manual
provisioning to 100 percent virtual deployments, and customer
spending for the new services is 50 to 60 percent higher than
Ritter anticipated.
"We've turned server-hugging skepticism into
cloud-first approaches," Fergerson says. "I see it all the
time. The subscriptions start with just one low-risk server,
then it seems like every time I check back on that tenant, they are
adding more and more resources in the cloud as the trust
grows. The Ritter cloud is a simple, customer-friendly,
highly automated offering, and it's been the catalyst for a mind
shift-for us and our customers."
Additional
Resources
Read case study: NTT Communications
Read case study: T-Systems
Read case study: scanplus GmbH
Read case study: Hosters
Read case study: Tieto Oyj
Read case study: Ritter Communications
Learn more about: Cisco ACI
Learn more about Cisco ACI ecosystem partners
Learn more about: Cisco data center technology
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