We live in a world where management looks to us to launch applications more often, more quickly, at less cost. If you want to go ‘under the hood’ and see with your own eyes as a peer makes this happen with a private cloud, read on – you can do so this month.
Gone are the days of ordering & installing new hardware willy-nilly, but virtual resources can still take several days or a week to get usable; meanwhile we’re chasing down requirements, hunting zombie VMs we can kill & reclaim resources from, waiting in queues for admins to finish other tasks. Getting fully-configured & available for the department or customer requesting service could take 2 days – if it’s a fire drill (and we honestly like to avoid that). AWS may be forbidden by policy. And many of us have no personal experience with private clouds, service catalogs, or even how to define items you’d put in such a catalog.
So we’ve reached out to our friends at Cisco and asked them to join us for a webinar on February 28th to put the theory into practice – live – so everyone can see the steps & get the play-by-play while a service gets orchestrated the modern “cloudy” data center. It should take about 20 minutes, and the rest will be Q&A from the audience. (Sorry, no sales pitch is included; if that’s what you want, put that elsewhere on your schedule.)
Earlier this year, we worked with the Cisco team to build a private cloud so that (internal or external) customer orders come in, and configured resources come out. At the beginning of the week, there was a FlexPod with VMware. By the end of the week, there was a private or IaaS cloud, ready to take orders. In between, the team had installed and integrated Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (CIAC) and Zenoss Cloud Service Assurance (ZCSA). CIAC supplied the service catalog, order management, orchestration, and provisioning functions, while ZCSA turned cloud infrastructure awareness into tenant-focused service assurance.
So on our webinar with Cisco, See it done: Service Orchestration on Cisco UCS, the audience will take part in a fully-interactive, purely educational real-time cloud orchestration exercise. Wayne Greene from Cisco and Kent Erickson and Gerard Berthet from Zenoss will be the tour guides under the hood of our cloud. You’ll take away:
- Insight as to how business leaders judge the success of any private cloud
- Rule-of-thumb guidance on estimating application deployment leadtimes, when comparing project launches on physical vs. virtual vs. cloud infrastructure
- Clarity as to the modern customer’s reporting expectations, when it comes to their cloud resources (<sarcasm> thanks, Amazon, for raising the bar here </sarcasm>)
- The ability to say (with a straight face): “yeah, I’ve seen that done & know how to do it” when it comes to orchestrating IT services with the modern cloud
When it comes to Converged Infrastructure, it’s easy to get bogged down in the marketing hype. Rest assured you won’t find hype at this webinar. Just a live demo & straight answers to your direct questions about what can be done with Cisco’s Virtual Multiservice Data Center (VMDC) reference architecture, paired with Zenoss Cloud Service Assurance. We hope you’ll join us.
Event Details
- Date: Thursday, February 28th
- Time: 1pm, CST
- Duration: 1 hour
