Philip Joseph, General Manager at Nadair Al Faris believes that digital transformation starts with datacentre transformation in a candid interview with CNME Editor Mark Forker.
It goes without saying that digital transformation begins with the transformation of the data center. How is Cisco’s data center solution positioned to support customers as their digital transformation continues to accelerate?
Cisco has a well-defined technology strategy to support IT in their transition to the Edge Cloud Continuum.
Cisco’s Strategy is built on the foundation of delivering purpose-built data center infrastructures focused on three pillars: Automation, Multi-cloud Strategy and Pervasive Security.
Cisco Data Center offers a broad spectrum of key solutions to support customers in driving their Digital Transformation experience.
Some of these key solutions are – Cloud-Native AppDev Platform (Cisco Container Platform), SDN (ACI Anywhere, Network Assurance Engine), Multi-cloud Orchestration, Automation and Infrastructure as Code (Intersight), Hyper Converged Infra.
In addition to that, Data Protection Sol, Compute UCS for the coming decade, HyperFlex, Visibility/ Actionable Insights (Nexus Dashboard, AppDynamics) Security (Stealthwatch, Tetration), Multi-Cloud Optimization (Intersight Workload Optimization) and superior SAN connectivity experience through leading MDS solutions.
What is your view on the role of the Cisco Nexus Dashboard platform?
The new Cisco Nexus Dashboard delivers a unified experience and automation of workflows by standardizing the Cisco Nexus Dashboard platform (physical/virtual/cloud).
This allows us to standardize operational processes on one platform. It provides advanced visibility, monitoring, orchestration and deployment services from a unified pane of glass.
The Cisco Nexus Dashboard platform can be deployed on a hybrid cloud infrastructure in the form factor of the customer’s choice (physical/virtual or cloud).
The Nexus dashboard platform is extensible and integrates with third-party services such as ServiceNow and Splunk and also provides a central point for cross-domain integrations and is a key component in the direction of achieving Full Stack Observability.
How easy is it to onboard public cloud sites to the NX Dashboard?
It’s a seamless journey to onboard and manage multi-cloud environments, including on-premises, with site onboarding for Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Cisco Nexus Dashboard is now available in the AWS and Azure marketplaces.
When it comes down to operational services, does NX Orchestrator prove to simplify, automate, and operate hybrid cloud networks?
Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator provides granular visibility and connectivity across different fabric controllers and unifies them into a Single Orchestrator, ensuring that consistent goal-based policies are properly provisioned .
It ensures Visibility, inter-site connectivity and site-wide configuration of multiple fabrics through a single pane of glass while using the distributed scale-out model of Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) and Cisco NX-OS with Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (NDFC) controllers for on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments.
Where do you see the Cisco Intersights platform adding value to IT-Ops?
Intersight is a cloud operations platform that provides a simple and unified ‘dashboard’ for any infrastructure that is easy and accessible through multiple modes or platforms, be it the traditional local machine in the support area, remote work (home environment), or mobile ( android or IOS), because it is web-based.
This has a tremendous impact on efficiency and time savings, by managing a pool of resources together.
Simply put, Intersight streamlines operations and accelerates problem-solving for complex IT-Infra and standardizes language and methodology between different operations teams to work as one team instead of disparate ones team in silos.
How do you see customer challenges being proactively addressed by Cisco innovations including Intersight, HyperFlex, and UCS X?
Cisco’s innovative products and Solutions address real-time customer challenges.
The hyper-distributed nature of hybrid clouds creates islands of infrastructure and operations, reducing visibility while increasing costs and complexity.
The wide variety of Applications drives the diversity of the infrastructure, which requires specialized systems, which also increases operational complexity.
Fragmentation of technologies hinders time-to-value by forcing IT organizations to spend valuable time and resources on platform integrations. Also, Cisco solutions offer Investment protection by providing proven technology that is ready for the future.