Unified Hybrid Cloud Deployments

Co-Authored by Usha Andra

As customers migrate their applications to hybrid cloud environments, they have great flexibility in choosing data centers to run their various workloads. However, with this flexibility comes enormous operational complexity as operations teams try to avoid costly downtime, meet business SLAs, and cost-effectively scale underlying infrastructure distributed among multiple data centers to meet dynamic business needs.

This challenge is exasperating as traditional IT organizations work with administrators that use siloed tools and processes. For example, when an issue occurs in one data center, it’s difficult and time consuming to correlate information from various tools and many IT teams to identify the root cause and remediate the issue.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard addresses this challenge, bringing all the operational services into one view and platform, while simplifying the process of operating hybrid cloud infrastructure. To bring this value to Amazon Web Services (AWS) users, Cisco Nexus Dashboard is available in AWS Marketplace through a bring-your-own-license (BYOL) licensing model. Even better, the software license is currently free to run on AWS.

Single portal view of operational services

The success of today’s modern businesses rests on the digital customer experiences delivered through their applications. Applications that are sluggish or down can break a business as customers flee to competitive offerings. In comparison, consistently delivering exceptional user experiences is key to building long-term customer loyalty.

When supporting applications, IT, DevOps and networking teams have historically operated in conventionally reactive, break-then-fix modes of operation with multiple control points, tool sprawl, and disconnected processes. Although this approach may have worked when applications were run in legacy, on-premises environments where IT controlled all infrastructure (including the network), modern applications and hybrid cloud deployments demand a synchronized, single operational view.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard provides this single, unified operational view across all sites and services within a customer’s hybrid cloud footprint, unifying disparate views of hybrid cloud data center operations, application deployment, and performance. This cloud monitoring and management tool scales out based on the size and number of sites and the operational services used to manage them. The Cisco Nexus Dashboard also provides the operations team with a simple, consistent method for service access control and life cycle management of the unified operations’ infrastructure and services (see Figure 1).

Common policy-based model across data centers

With Cisco Nexus Dashboard, businesses can migrate workloads to AWS and operate hybrid infrastructure with a common policy and governance model across the entire infrastructure. In other words, customers can elastically scale their infrastructure into the cloud in a policy-driven manner to secure a uniform access and segmentation posture, while adhering to the relevant compliance and governance mandates.

As today’s businesses become laser-focused on delivering exceptional customer experiences, they increasingly choose to run their applications in hybrid cloud environments that include AWS public cloud infrastructure. As the roles of NetOps and DevOps expand, they need an automation tool set to accelerate data center operations and securely manage hybrid cloud deployments. Cisco Nexus Dashboard provides operations teams with a unified view and a simple way to proactively resolve issues before they can impact user experiences.

“Cisco Nexus Dashboard availability in AWS Marketplace helps our customers automate and operate their hybrid cloud networks in a faster, simpler, and cost-effective way while modernizing applications, enabling faster time-to-market and increasing innovation.”
Muffadal Quettawala, Sr. Solution Architect, AWS

Sound interesting? Visit the Cisco Nexus Dashboard site for more information and watch the video here. Also, check out the Cisco Nexus Dashboard, available now at AWS Marketplace.

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