Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform

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Solution Overview

BENEFITS

Deliver complete cloud services with confidence:

Offer best-in-class hybrid, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS services enabled by product-level engineering and integration from Cisco and Microsoft.

Lower deployment risk with a jointly developed, tested, and validated solution from Cisco and Microsoft.

Help ensure solution performance with lifecycle management from Cisco and Microsoft.

Release and sell new services faster:

Accelerate your time to market with prebuilt, pretested service templates and protocols built into the solution.

Provision new services in minutes through deep integration of Cisco ACI and WAP.

Deliver new cloud services rapidly using Microsoft Azure and Cisco Intercloud Fabric^™.

Increase profitability from your investment:

Reduce TCO and improve margins with operational simplicity and control.

Close more deals with joint go-to-market sales and presales resources and support.

Develop and deploy new and differentiated services on an open architecture.

Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud

Platform

Rapidly deliver cloud services while

simplifying operations, reducing costs,

and increasing profitability. Cisco

^®

Cloud

Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud

Platform can make all this possible.

Bringing new services to market can be a challenge for cloud providers. It requires a close eye on costs and careful management of the complex integration of infrastructure and application layers. Providers need to enhance speed to market, improve cloud service performance, enable as-a-service monetization, and deliver hybrid cloud readiness, all while providing global- ready solutions.

Together, Cisco and Microsoft have developed, tested, and validated the Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform. This solution enables delivery of a variety of cloud solutions while lowering deployment risk and improving TCO. Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform combines Windows Azure Pack (WAP) and Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI^™) into a preintegrated solution. With this flexible solution, you can rapidly and confidently deliver hybrid cloud services while simplifying operations and reducing costs.

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Designed for scale-up enterprise workloads and applications, the solution lets you offer IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and more from a single platform. With application and infrastructure policies preconfigured and delivered in the WAP application policy library, you can quickly deploy new services and applications. Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform can reduce the cost of delivering applications and services for your cloud business today, while giving you the opportunity to invest in cloud native capabilities for future services, new customers, and additional revenue.

A World of Many Clouds and Expectations

Service providers face significant challenges and opportunities:

● As-a-service monetization: Profitably market cloud solutions offered as-a-service.

● Speed to market: Improve agility and speed time to market with innovative cloud services.

● Cloud service performance: Deliver scalable, flexible, reliable, and secure cloud services.

● Meet customer SLAs: Improve CapEx and OpEx efficiencies.

● Hybrid cloud readiness: Offer workload portability, security, and network policy management with agile infrastructure provisioning.

● Global-ready solutions: Expand market and customer reach with the ability to extend services globally and meet data sovereignty compliance requirements.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) has created new expectations, opportunities, and challenges for cloud providers.

As customers move away from isolated systems to rapidly reconfigurable services, they require an application- aware, public-cloud-connected, converged platform for service delivery. Cloud providers need to deliver virtual machine environments from an automated platform that offers self-service capabilities and expertly tuned

environments for specific workloads. Building this type of multicloud service requires an infrastructure designed to work from hardware to applications in a multicloud environment.

Taking a Lifecycle Approach to Policy Management

Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform offers simple operation and a lifecycle approach to service delivery and policy management (Figure 1).

With the integration of the Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) directly into Windows Azure Pack, we are delivering a jointly developed and engineered solution for secure cloud deployment. Because the application and infrastructure policies are preconfigured and delivered in a WAP application policy library, you can deploy new services and applications faster.

“Cisco and Microsoft provide unique value and compelling capabilities

on their own. Combined, they offer superior performance across the

solution stack.”

— Adi Kabazo, Cloud and Hosted Services Manager, TELUS Business Solutions

“Because we have the endorsement of both Cisco and Microsoft we’re

in a much better position to ensure this is designed to work from the

ground up.”

— Adi Kabazo, Cloud and Hosted Services Manager, TELUS Business Solutions

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Figure 1. Offer IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS from a Single, Jointly Developed Cloud Platform

Cisco ACI, the industry’s most comprehensive software defined networking (SDN) architecture, dramatically reduces TCO, automates IT tasks, and accelerates data center application deployments. It offers excellent network visibility through the integration of physical and virtual environments across networks, servers, storage, security, and services, and dynamically implements security and policy across all elements based on the workload. With these capabilities, cloud providers can deploy new applications and services at DevOps speed, with lifecycle support from Cisco, Microsoft, and a growing partner ecosystem.

Operational Simplicity

Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform is based on joint engineering between Cisco and Microsoft. It includes hooks between Cisco Unified Computing System^™ (Cisco UCS^®) server platforms and Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 unified management platform. This approach offers programmatic control of the server and network infrastructure through System Center. Microsoft’s PowerShell tools enable rapid data center deployment, tenant setup, visibility, and recovery and backup capabilities.

Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform is a Cisco Validated Design and a Microsoft FastTrack- certified solution. It includes:

Microsoft Cloud Platform

● Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 with Hyper-V

● Microsoft System Center 2012 R2

◦ Virtual Machine Manager

“Having a purpose-built, proven platform helps accelerate our time to

market. This joint Cisco and Microsoft effort enables us to launch [this

solution] faster than anyone else.”

— Julija Noskova, Director Cloud Marketing, TELUS Business Solutions

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◦ Operations Manager

● Microsoft Windows Azure Pack (WAP) Cisco Cloud Architecture

● Cisco UCS servers

● Cisco UCS with local SAS and SSD storage

● Cisco UCS Manager and fabric interconnect

● Cisco UCS Power Tool to build on Microsoft PowerShell for computing and storage

● Cisco Nexus^® Family switches

◦ Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches

◦ Cisco ASR 1000 Series Aggregation Services Routers

◦ Cisco ASR 9000 Series

● NetApp or EMC unified storage systems

Joint Engineering, Architectures, and Support Services

● Scripting and architecture IP to enable rapid deployment and application-centric infrastructure capabilities

● Cisco and Microsoft validated reference designs and professional services for IT service providers

● Resource adapters for application and infrastructure policy translation

● 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, solution support

● Professional services for solution creation and deployment

With this solution, you can rapidly scale and create best-in-class cloud offerings for your customers.

Joint Go-to-Market Strategy

Cloud providers who build their networks with these reference architectures are eligible to participate in the Cisco Powered^™ and Microsoft Azure Certified for Hybrid Cloud programs with comprehensive go-to-market support.

Cisco Powered cloud providers are an integral element of our Intercloud strategy, providing the local cloud capability required for government and industry certification requirements, while addressing data sovereignty and residency needs.

“It’s not just the technology that is very attractive to us. It’s also the

support that Cisco and Microsoft offer for service providers to launch an

innovative strategy while minimizing risk.”

“This is just the beginning. We are going to be evolving with Cisco and

Microsoft. Both companies are extremely innovative and help us look

ahead to discover how our services will change. This is the next step in

our journey together.”

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Services

Figure 2. Cisco Advanced Service for Cisco Cloud Architecture for Microsoft Cloud Platform

Cisco Advanced Services can help you create an integrated public cloud solution that implements Cisco validated cloud infrastructure, elements from the Microsoft Service Provider Reference Architecture (SPRA), and Cisco Validated Design for Microsoft FastTrack v4 (Figure 2). This solution can scale to support a large number of enterprise workloads, and grow to support multiple product offerings. These services are available from Cisco for the Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform:

● Workshop for Microsoft Hybrid Cloud Services to understand the solution needs and develop detail requirements for the solution

● Cisco Data Center Validation Service for a proof of concept in a customer’s lab environment

● Cisco Data Center Plan and Build Service to implement the solution to meet customer needs

● Cisco Data Center Operations Enablement Services for operations readiness and support

● Cisco Data Center Optimization Service for Cloud for managing the solution efficiently

● Migration services such as Windows 2003-to-2012 migration, Exchange and SQL Server migration to cloud, and workload migration to cloud from other private data center and public cloud environments

Cisco Advanced Services personnel are highly trained on Microsoft and Cisco solutions such as Cisco UCS, Cisco Intercloud Fabric, and Cisco ACI. We support your cloud business needs with highly customizable solutions that help meet your customers’ business outcomes.

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The key to the Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform solution is the integration of Cisco ACI and Microsoft WAP. By integrating the APIC - the unified point of automation and centralized management for the Cisco ACI fabric, policy programming, and health monitoring - into Windows Azure Pack, we are creating a structural linkage between Cisco infrastructure and the Microsoft cloud platform. As we map the application policy to infrastructure policy for Microsoft and third-party ISV applications, these Cisco ACI “patterns” live in the WAP tool. Cisco ACI policies that are “tuned” for specific workloads, such as Microsoft SQL Server, can then easily be instantiated by the administrator with complete policy, security, firewall, and much more tuned for each workload. This capability is unique to our offering.

Why Cisco?

Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform is an extensible, flexible, and scalable platform to deliver hybrid, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and other solutions that your customers are adopting today. It offers exceptional management integration and a highly flexible and scalable cloud that can be the foundation for cloud service models now and into the future.

Cisco is uniquely positioned to address the challenges of connecting different clouds with disparate operating systems and hypervisors. Together with Microsoft, we offer the widest array of applications and consumption options to our joint service provider customers and their customers.

Cisco Capital

Financing to Help You Achieve Your Objectives

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Next Steps

Meet with your Cisco and Microsoft partner account managers to discuss how the Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform can help your business grow, attract and retain customers, add to your client offerings, and increase your bottom line.

Visit http://www.cisco.com/go/ccamcp or http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/partner-program/ to learn more.