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™), 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 CommunicationsNTT 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.
HostersHosters, 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 GmbHAs 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 OyjTieto 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 CommunicationsHeadquartered 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 ResourcesRead case study: NTT
CommunicationsRead case study: T-SystemsRead case study:
scanplus GmbHRead case study: HostersRead case study:
Tieto OyjRead case study: Ritter CommunicationsLearn
more about: Cisco ACILearn more about Cisco ACI ecosystem
partnersLearn more about: Cisco data center
technology
About CiscoCisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) is the worldwide
technology leader that has been making the Internet work since
1984. Our people, products, and partners help society securely
connect and seize tomorrow's digital opportunity today. Discover
more at thenetwork.cisco.com and follow us on Twitter at
@Cisco.
Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks
of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. A
listing of Cisco's trademarks can be found at
www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are
the property of their respective owners. The use of the word
partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and
any other company.
RSS Feed for Cisco: http://newsroom.cisco.com/rss-feeds
Press
Relations: Lee
Davis
Cisco 650-868-3036 leedavis@cisco.com
Analyst Relations: Aimee
Schoaf Cisco 623-377-0377 aschoaf@cisco.com
Investor RelationsCarol
VillazonCisco408-527-6538carolv@cisco.com
Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO)
Historical Stock Chart
From Mar 2024 to Apr 2024
Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO)
Historical Stock Chart
From Apr 2023 to Apr 2024