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Product Data Sheet

Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud

Early adopters of cloud-based service delivery were seeking additional cost savingsbeyond those achieved with server virtualization and abstraction. However, they

quickly understood that the real value of cloud-based computing was the speed,

flexibility, and agility that allow IT to rapidly align with business decisions.

Such alignment frees IT staff to focus on critical projects that deliver advanced business capabilities supporting

competitive innovation. IT recognizes that to optimize cloud deployments for greater speed, flexibility, and agility,

they need better cloud management solutions.

The foundational element IT now needs to put in place in order to unlock the potential for greater speed, flexibility,

and agility that cloud can deliver is holistic cloud management that delivers automation and the comprehensive

orchestration of services. This type of solution helps IT make the transition from virtualization and abstraction totransparent end-to-end service delivery.

Cisco

Intelligent Automation for Cloud (Cisco IAC) is a holistic cloud management solution with broad coverage

for various types of cloud deployments. This solution provides automated IT operations for cloud computing with

policy-based controls to provision virtual and physical resources in private, public, and hybrid cloud environments.

The solution includes a self-service portal, orchestration engine, and advanced cloud management capabilities

that are fundamental to delivering the agility, flexibility, and speed desired by todays transformational data

centers.

Cloud automation allows IT to align more closely than ever before with the demands of todays 24-hour-per-day

business environment. As organizations continue to rapidly adopt cloud-based service delivery, automated

management has become essential for IT to realize the full value, flexibility, and agility needed by todays virtualdata centers.

Product Overview

Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud is a cloud management software solution that delivers a critical foundation

layer for deploying and managing cloud-based computing in a holistic and unified way. The solution provides

essential automated management and orchestration that allows organizations to control and manage cloud-based

services transparently throughout their lifecycles (Figure 1). This solution can cover diverse cloud deployments

and is a flexible solution that can scale from test and development to production workloads, from initial cloud pilots

to large-scale enterprise-wide initiatives to deliver maximum value to customers.


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The Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud foundational building blocks of cloud computing that help IT

organizations to advance their cloud deployments to gain greater speed, flexibility and agility are shown in

Figure 1.

Figure 1. Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud Solution

Web-based self-service portal and service catalog

Authorizing customers to order from a standardized list of service menus and provisioning templates

facilitates the wide-scale automation that significantly expedites setting up resource requests. These

environments need to be set to corporate standards and governance guidelines while reducing human

error. The Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud web-based self-service portal gives users the ability to

browse from a catalog of predefined service options or from customized workflows defined by IT or the

service provider. Once services are orders, end users can track order status, modify and manage

completed orders, and view usage, consumption, and costs for all service orders.

Service delivery automation

Automation is critical to unifying and standardizing data centers, because it simplifies operations, reduces

costs, and promotes business flexibility. Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud automation engine breaks

end-user requests into individual components and orchestrates the order across infrastructure resources,

the operating system, and applications. It also reports back to the end user on consumption through

metering, chargeback, and billing systems. Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud also provides updates toconfiguration management databases (CMDBs) as well as system management tools to help ensure that

configuration-related information used by incident, change, and release management systems are up to

date.


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Operational process automation

Operational process automation benefits the organization by reducing the risk and latency of managing

both physical and virtual environments. Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud automates IT best practices

in a secure and repeatable manner through service templates for operational and support tasks, user and

performance management, and reports for audit tracking and reporting. Cisco Intelligent Automation for

Cloud provides over 200 predefined best practices and workflows, as well as tools that allow IT

administrators to easily construct customized workflows or processes.

Resource management

Resource management in large-scale cloud models requires performance isolation and efficient use of the

hardware infrastructure. Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud uses the concept of resource pools, or

logical containers, across hypervisor, compute, network, and storage infrastructures allocated to specific or

multiple virtual machines to the users specific order. Allocating resources into logical containers provides

isolation from noisy neighbors as well as the ability to share resources across multiple users. Cisco

Intelligent Automation for Cloud complements the Cisco Unified Computing System(Cisco UCS) and

Cisco Network Services Manager (NSM), but other Cisco and third-party solutions can be easily integrated,

including service management tools and operational processes.

Lifecycle management

Lifecycle management of a cloud service runs from service request through decommissioning of the

service and allows optimal utilization of resources, whether human, virtual, or physical. Cisco Intelligent

Automation for Cloud tools facilitate tracking of all aspects of individual services, including project and

business information captured during the initial order and data about the various elements being

provisioned to support the service from initiation to retirement. Decommissioning of resources reduces

underutilization and potential virtual server sprawl.

Cloud Management

Infrastructure and the foundational elements are vital to a successful cloud deployment, but cloud management

provides the connections that make cloud computing effective. Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud extends

beyond basic cloud computing to include extensive management support and comprehensive coverage for simple

or complex cloud deployments. Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud delivers:

Scalable clouds, from single virtual machines up to large-scale deployments in virtual data centers

Management of multiple cloud environments, from industry leaders to open-source solutions

Standardized extensions, to easily configure IT processes and workflows

The end result for Cisco customers is a cloud operating model that delivers increased speed, responsiveness,

user satisfaction, and operational efficiency.

Features and Benefits

We provide several newcloud management featureswith the release of Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud

3.1, delivering greater business value while reducing total cost of ownership for our customers. Some of these

important new capabilities of version 3.1 are described below.

Virtual Data Centers

Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud can manage a wide range of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) use cases,

from simple ordering of virtual machines from a shared pool of resources with no approvals to more advanced


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virtual data centers with dedicated resource pools for project teams, departments, or entire organizations (see

Figure 2). Virtual data centers are perfect for organizational units where a range of defined sizes

(for example, small, medium, and large) can be requisitioned with specific configuration limits. To guard against

unrestrained resource reservations, approval and oversight is completed by the organizations cloud administrator

or by the service provider, through the portal. Once approved, all users in the specific organization have equal

access to resources. The same requisition and approval process is used in the event an organization needs to

add resources.

Figure 2. Dashboard of All Virtual Data Centers

CloudSync

A new and unique feature in cloud computing is CloudSync, which introduced infrastructure discovery to provide

visibility to cloud infrastructure elements and the management systems connected to them (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Infrastructure Discovery Keeps Administrator in Control of the Service Catalog


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Infrastructure discovery can be completed on demand or scheduled in 1- to 24-hour increments as specified by

the administrator. CloudSync places the cloud administrator in control of the service catalog menus available for

order by simply controlling the rank of a specific service or element. For example, if an error is detected in a

service template, the administrator can change the status to maintenance, temporarily removing this service from

the catalog. To permanently remove a service from the catalog, the administrator changes its status to ignore.

Once errors or problems are discovered, CloudSync empowers the administrator to prevent further propagation of

problems while remediation occurs.

Network as a Service

Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud bundles Cisco Network Services Manager (NSM), providing the foundation

for end-to-end network services provisioning. This is the first step in a deeper integration between Cisco Intelligent

Automation for Cloud and NSM that will be released over the next 12 months. A Cisco NSM adapter, included with

Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud 3.1, permits rapid building of network automation for network provisioning

that can be completed by a trained customer or through a partner or Cisco Services engagement.

Service Remediation

Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud provides workflow remediation capabilities that deliver industry-leading

capabilities to the cloud administrator or service provider when errors occur. Using a simple dashboard, the

administrator can quickly identify the services affected and select the appropriate action to continue or return to

the beginning of the specific workflow.

Actions include:

Cancel workflow

Retry from point of failure

Restart from workflow beginning

Ignore error, continue to next step

Roll back to previous workflow version

Clouds Your Way

Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud provides over 200 extension points for the self-service portal and

orchestration workflows to protect the investment in custom extensions required by todays cloud environments.

These extension points promote best practices and the reuse of IT intellectual capital, allowing knowledge of

domain experts to be automated into workflows and system provisioning templates across the entire organization.

Additionally, these extension points reduce the complexity of integration with system management tools from

different vendors. Extension point examples include: integration into IT service management system or service

desk application, document asset management changes, and setup and decommissioning of monitoring or serviceassurance.

Solution Acceleration Extensions

Solution accelerator kits can be used to complement Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud ability to manage

physical and virtual infrastructures across multicloud and multihypervisor environments. A new multicloud

accelerator kit allows Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud to manage physical and virtual infrastructures across

OpenStack, Amazon EC2, and VMware vCloud Director. When using the OpenStack cloud platform to develop

open-source clouds, the accelerator kit extends Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud hypervisor support to

include Red Hat RHEV, Citrix XenServer, and Microsoft Hyper-V.


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Major Requirements

Hardware and software requirements for Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud are listed in Table 1.

Table 1. System Requirements for Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud

VMware vCenter 1 vCenter instance supported1000 hosts; 10,000 power-on virtual machines

Hypervisor and manager ESXi 4.1 (including bare metal)

ESXi 5.0 (excluding bare metal)

vCenter/vSphere 4.1 or 5.0 (5.0U1)

Cisco UCS blade models and UCS Manager (UCSM) B200, B230, B250, B440, C2x0

UCSM releases 2.0 and 2.1

Cisco Network Services Manager Release 5.0.2

Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) server Portal:

Microsoft Active Directory 2008

Sun Java System Directory Server 5.2 P6

IBM Tivoli Directory Server 6.1

Orchestrator: Microsoft Active Directory 2003, 2008

Operating system Portal and orchestrator: Windows Server 2008 64-bit

Portal and server provisioner: Red Hat 5.6 or CentOS 5.6

Web server Portal:

Apache 2.2

IBM HTTP Server 6.1

Microsoft IIS 7.5

Orchestrator: Microsoft IIS 6.0, 7.0

Application server Portal:JBoss 7 + Sun JDK 6 Update 23+

Orchestrator: .NET Framework 4.0

System database MS SQL Server 2008 R2

Oracle 11g R2

Browser Internet Explorer 8 or 9

Firefox 3.5, 3.6, and 4.0

For More Information

Additional information about Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud is available at http://cisco.com/go/iacloud.

To learn more about our other Cisco Intelligent Automation solutions, please visit http://cisco.com/go/ia.

Printed in USA C78-678564-05 11/1
http://cisco.com/go/iahttp://cisco.com/go/iacloud

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