Keep Pace in the Data Economy
Get insights fast with a flexible data platform. Find your winning combination: #Datacenter #Cloud #BigData #Analytics
Keep Pace in the Data Economy
Transform your data into business insights with converged infrastructure
New Priorities
Dynamic business needs call for new technological developments
Transformation
Transformation and technological
developments go hand in hand in the dynamic business environment of today.
Cloud, Big Data and Analytics, the Internet of Things (IoT), workforce mobility, high-quality video communications and such trends are driving change in companies of all sizes.
Business is being transformed by data. This digitisation is redefining the way companies evolve, interact with customers, and compete.
Establish your IT priorities and respond to business demands
Organisations like yours need to support innovation and growth, improve productivity and maintain your competitive edge. You need ways to:
- Optimise the end user experience
- Better automate and control things
- Increase security and improve fulfilment
- Develop new business models
"How effectively a company turns its data into actionable insights is now seen as a competitive differentiator."
Your IT teams must keep pace. But they have limited insight into business processes, and don't have the visibility and real-time data they need.
Slow provisioning times also make it difficult for them to respond to the new demands of customers and line of business.
Data analytics drives a big increase in sales
Big Data platforms support the collection, storage and management of a wide variety of data types. Analytics combine statistics, machine
learning and data processing in order to extract valuable information and insights from them.
With innovative computing infrastructure, data management platforms and applications you can:
- Process Big Data centrally
- Analyse data in real time, in the best format
- Respond fast to new business requirements
- Simplify IT to reduce costs
Discover how data can transform your business
Infrastructure Matters
Deliver actionable insights in real-time with optimised platforms
Old and new
To stay ahead of the competition, you must keep your costs down, be more agile and move fast.
You need new platforms to integrate seamlessly with existing IT environments and processes. Security and compliance mandates must also continue to be met while your business adaps to change.
Converged infrastructure combines compute and storage into a single appliance. It comes pre-configured, tested, validated and supported end-to-end. This helps you reduce risk and your time to market, while increasing profitability.
Find the right balance of cost, performance, and flexiblity
Certified infrastructure is important for solutions such as SAP HANA, but it's not typically a focus for companies looking to enhance their Big Data capabilities. However, infrastructure matters.
Gartner estimates that 60% of Big Data projects fail due to issues with skills, tools and culture. A third of the Big Data projects we’ve seen fail are due to a lack of investment in infrastructure strategy.
"A Big Data infrastructure needs to be high performing and highly available, must be able to handle large variations in demand, and has to scale well (ideally linearly) and easily."
Legacy infrastructure is inflexible, while cloud solutions are often too expensive when it comes to supporting data-intensive applications.
Tested and proven
Converged infrastructure combines compute, storage and network seamlessly. Tested and validated designs are quicker to deploy, provide greater agility and efficiency, and are suitable for all your data requirements - whether Big Data and Analytics, or SAP HANA data platforms.
Choose a solution validated by major software vendors and you can deploy it pre-tested as is, or use it as a template for building your own. These solutions are enterprise-ready, can scale to 1000s of servers, and come complete with services and support - from infrastructure to application stack.
5 reasons why infrastructure matters for Big Data
Automate & Orchestrate
Turbo-charge your data projects
Secret sauce
Automation & orchestration provides the secret sauce for taking data projects into production with less cost and risk.
It’s possible to deliver the majority of your core IT infrastructure through a single management tool with point-and-click simplicity.
You can deploy applications to on-premise data centres, or private clouds and public clouds too.
Deploy, adapt and scale from a single management pane
A data centre 'stack' of network, compute, storage and virtualisation includes many management points. These are operated using different management tools, and often by different teams.
The result is that as much as 62% of your administrative costs go to deployment, monitoring, updating and troubleshooting – not to activities that add new value to your business.
Analysis proves that running Big Data and SAP HANA on Cisco UCS yields huge productivity and efficiency gains for businesses.
Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) is a family of converged and hyperconverged infrastructure solutions that includes platforms optimised for SAP HANA, Big Data, and analytic workloads.
Turn your data growth into instant insights
With server hardware abstracted and modelled in software, UCS-managed servers can be deployed in minutes instead of days. Based on systems live at 100+ customers, UCS delivers an 84% reduction in provisioning times.
As an example, UCS for Big Data is managed with Cisco UCS Director (UCSD) Express, which delivers a dramatic reduction in the number of different management points. It provides a self-service portal for rolling out new workloads quickly – irrespective of whether you're provisioning on physical or virtual (hypervisor) infrastructure.
More on Cisco UCS Director Express for Big Data
Policy-Based Automation
The perfect platform for building out your digital core
Low-touch
Application-driven infrastructure is key when data projects go from pilots to enterprise deployments delivering new business insights.
Automated delivery and governance of application and infrastructure using defined policies is an important step toward digitisation.
Policies can be defined once and rolled out automatically across your entire infrastructure, enabling a Software-Defined Everything (SDx) approach to deployment, delivery and continuous monitoring from top to bottom.
Run simple with complex
enterprise applications
Do you want to achieve cloud-like economy and agility, but with security assured for enterprise scale applications?
How about eliminating the manual work required to set up the underlying infrastructure and enterprise application stack?
"...SDN is the key technology that enables automated provisioning, network virtualisation, and improved network programmability. "
Software Defined Network (SDN) technology separates configuration from physical connections and hardware, meaning new applications can be provisioned, deployed and connected faster. Yet any form of software-defined is dependent on infrastructure intelligence and programmability.
Zero-touch, policy-driven deployments
Cisco UCS delivered programmable and software-defined capabilities from the start. Our SDN platform is known as Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and we are the only vendor to offer policy-driven automation for Big Data applications and SAP HANA deployments.
ACI makes IT more agile by enabling network, application, security and virtualisation teams to automate manual tasks. It has been embraced by more than 2,700 customers globally, including CenturyLink, who delivers powerful enterprise applications with cloud-like economy and agility.
Explore Cisco ACI and SDN in more detail
Turn Data into Insights Faster
Install and configure Big Data clusters easily
Go fast
You don’t always know what you’re looking for, or what you’ll find when performing data analysis. So you can’t define everything upfront.
But you do need to provide access to the data and allow your people to experiment in ways that don’t hinder security or introduce risk.
Hadoop allows any type of data to be stored and explored, while data management platforms provide security and data protection.
Crucially, there's no need to wrestle with the challenges you get with generic IT infrastructure.
Data management platforms purpose built for enterprise users
Hadoop is a Big Data Analytics platform providing a much faster way to get customer insights.
Unlike traditional relational databases that require information to be transformed into a specified structure before it can be loaded, Hadoop stores data in its raw format (i.e. unstructured data).
You can create a shared repository - or 'data lake' - running on a cluster of servers that can be accessed by all users within your organisation.
"Enterprises agree that speedy deployment of Big Data Hadoop platforms has been critical to their success..."
However, Hadoop clusters must be managed with appropriate governance and security.
Fastest file system on the planet
Cisco UCS for Big Data comes pretested and pre-validated for enterprise-class data management platforms including MapR, Cloudera, Hortonworks, and IBM (plus many more). These platforms allow you to store, protect and access data quickly and easily when using Hadoop-based applications.
You can also provision Hadoop clusters much faster using Big Data Automation, which is available under the Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite. As the orchestration platform for your data centre, it ensures infrastructure layers are synchronised, optimised and consistently available on demand.
Deploy Hadoop and Splunk clusters on demand
Lower the Cost of Storage
Benefit from cloud-like agility and economics
Evolution
The old ways of storing and archiving data are changing to accommodate growing amounts of data and demand for anytime, anywhere access to information.
Software-defined storage is a server virtualisation technology that combines the simplicity and agility of cloud with the cost benefits of industry standard servers.
It moves beyond virtual machines to virtual data stores and transforms systems into a single, logical pool of cost-effective storage resources that are easily integrated and managed within your data centre.
Ease the load with software-defined storage technologies
Data centre footprints and budgets cannot keep pace with data storage requirements.
Storing data in the public cloud can ease the load. But as your data grows and you need to access it more frequently, cloud services can become expensive, while the sovereignty of that data is out of your control.
"IT pros recognise Cisco as a leader in a package design and embedded networking tailored for hosting software-defined storage workloads. "
Software-defined storage allows you to shift large amounts of unstructured data to cost-effective, flexible solutions located on-premises. This assures performance and data sovereignty while reducing storage costs over time.
What our technology partners say
With Cisco UCS, you get to choose from C-Series Rack Servers and S-Series Storage Servers, making it easy to get the right capacity and performance for software-defined storage.
Validated solutions combine our servers with software from a broad ecosystem of partners to simplify the task of pooling IT resources and storing data across systems.
Crucially, role- and policy-based management means you can configure hundreds of storage servers as easily as you can configure one.
Learn more about software-defined storage
Get Closer to the Insights
Realise SAP HANA's full potential with integrated infrastructure
At source
Data is the new currency. But the data flows are huge, varied and rapid. The true value is not harnessed until insights are derived.
Since the potential value of data can be short-lived, there's the need to analyse it at source, as it arrives, in real time.
Data solutions that employ in-memory processing give your users immediate, drill-down access to all the data across your
enterprise applications, data warehouses and data lakes.
Deliver business value faster with converged infrastructure for SAP
SAP HANA is an in-memory database built for extreme transactional, analytical and application logic processing.
You can combine traditional sources of data with valuable data arriving continually from outside of your organisation and analyse it in real time.
"Organisations running SAP workloads on Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure solutions will achieve an average ROI of 528% and break even on their investment in nine months."
Running SAP applications such as HANA, HANA Vora and S/4 HANA on converged infrastructure provides you with an in-memory-enabled infrastructure that gives you all the benefits of a unified system.
How we use SAP HANA to identify opportunities
Cisco has a long history of delivering innovative infrastructure for SAP. With UCS Director, servers can be set up in minutes using policy-based automation, giving you a flexible data solution that’s easy to manage and fast to deploy.
We've developed joint solutions with Pure Storage, NetApp, IBM, and Dell/EMC as Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs) for HANA, as well as a SAP-certified appliance that includes C-Series servers and the MapR Converged Data Platform.
We're also the first SAP partner to certify software defined storage and 40 Gigabit Ethernet for faster responses to queries. Learn more
Redefine the potential of your data
Speed, efficiency and scale for data-intensive workloads
Why Cisco?
Few vendors are qualified to drive your transformation with data. But Cisco is.
Years of managing data and accelerating business have taught us exactly what’s needed to transform your organisation and turn your data into insights faster.
Keep pace in the data economy with the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS). Our revolutionary architecture means you can take the right decisions in real time with a cost-effective data solution that’s easy to manage, faster to deploy and flexible to your needs.
A data platform that’s fast, flexible, and easy to manage and scale
Cisco UCS is a trusted computing platform proven to deliver lower TCO and optimum performance and capacity for data-intensive workloads:
- Customise to workload demands, including expansion to 1000s of servers
- Comes with Cisco fabric interconnects for full active-active redundancy
- Rapid and consistent server configuration using service profiles
- Includes the Cisco UCS S3260 Storage Server for data-intensive workloads
DOMO keeps data fresh with Cisco UCS
85% of Fortune 500 companies and more than 60,000 organisations globally rely on Cisco UCS. The 5th generation features:
- M5 servers powered by Intel® Xeon® Processor Scalable Family
- Seamless integration of computing, storage, and networking
- A global inventory view, one-click system software management & configuration
UCS is supported by Actan, Cloudera, DataStax, Elastic, Hortonworks, IBM (BigInsights), MapR, Oracle (No SQL Database), Pivotal, Platfora, SAS, SAP, Splunk, and others. Explore the portfolio
