Last year I presented at the local Cisco DCUG to a warm and receptive audience about Cisco UCS Director being deployed on a global scale. At the time I was working for a global pharmaceutical company and following some organisational changes the requirements of the business and in turn IT changed to match. A key part of the changes focused on global standardisation of IT infrastructure to ensure 24 x 7 operational support. The best way to achieve that goal was to look at automation and orchestration. Cisco UCS Director was the tool chosen at the time. UCS Director is an absolute beast of a product and it reflects badly on Cisco as to how they have marketed and managed the product. It has potential to be the one stop shop for infrastructure management.
Concept:
Create a global platform to enable physical and virtual automation based on standardised templates and processes.
Purpose:
- Drive standardisation across 14 global sites, reduce management overheads and complexities
- Put the company in a position to leverage follow the sun support for infrastructure to minimise out of hours support at each local site
- Provide a secure platform that could easily meet strict auditing guidelines
- Deliver a mechanism to allow end-users to quickly and easily request new virtual machines
- Streamline the request for infrastructure processes and remove existing bottlenecks
- Drive the business towards a Private Cloud architecture rather than individual silos
- Reduce licensing costs across the business for multiple existing automation and orchestration platforms.
- The ability to provide a cost model and service catalog and quickly inform projects on the estimated potential costs of their projects.
- Integration into the existing service management tool
- Integration into HP Quality Control for auditing and quality control purposes. This allowed for installation verification scripts to be completed.
