Consolidate Data Centers Efficiently
Keep Critical Applications Running During a Data Center Migration
Migrating business-critical applications from one data center to another after a merger or acquisition can be especially difficult. Postmerger staff turnover sometimes limits available information about three important factors:
- Who uses existing applications
- Which network resources the applications use
- What interdependencies exist among the applications
Optimizing the Merged Environment
A merger often initiates a flood of planning and activity to integrate the operations of two complex organizations and deliver proposed cost savings. A priority for the merged IT organization is to capitalize on synergies between the existing IT environments by consolidating resources without disrupting current activities. The goal is an optimal new environment for managing (moving, replicating, backing up, and restoring) data and maturing the processes for discovering underused network resources to improve: virtualization, allocation, and use of storage; computing, network, bandwidth, and applications.
Avoiding Application Downtime
Maintaining the operations of critical business systems throughout the transition is one of the most challenging aspects of data center migration. Migration of a critical application has historically required planned downtime of the application to move the associated infrastructure and data. Even planned downtime that is expected to be limited can have adverse effects on your business:
- Incomplete insight into important migration dependencies can result in expensive postmigration business disruption.
- Unexpected incidents during the migration could extend the downtime of the application.
- Extended downtime of one application can affect upstream and downstream applications and systems.
Required downtime associated with the migration of business-critical applications is an undesirable exercise in risk mitigation and cost avoidance.
Analyzing, Then Migrating
The Cisco Service-Oriented Network Architecture (SONA) framework can help you: simplify data center migrations, reduce the risk involved, and accelerate planned consolidations
Two tools aid in your transition to the SONA framework: the Cisco Network Application Performance Analysis (NAPA) and Cisco Application-Oriented Networking (AON) solutions.
You can apply Cisco NAPA [link to http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6835/serv_group_home.html ]tools to clarify application and server users, traffic, and interdependencies. These tools also help you create an enterprise baseline model for gaining predictive insight and performing effect analysis before a migration. The insight you gain through Cisco NAPA tools and the baseline predictive model helps you optimize postmigration applications.
Cisco AON is a new class of network-embedded products and solutions that help you:
- Converge intelligent networks with application infrastructures based on service-oriented or traditional architectures
- Improve collaborative business processes by integrating applications and services that have proliferated into independent and fragmented environments
- Make it possible, through network-embedded intelligent message routing, for applications and the network to work together as an integrated system
Cisco AON does not require new intermediary layers or changes to existing applications, and it is delivered in a network-based solution that pervades the IT infrastructure. Cisco AON intercepts application messages as they cross the network and reconstructs them to inspect message content and context. Your network can capture and analyze interapplication messages and then apply application infrastructure optimization and security services for business activity monitoring and compliance.
Consolidating Your Enterprise Infrastructure
Together with these tools, Cisco SONA is a comprehensive network architecture reference framework that provides an extensive set of network-integrated services supporting a wide range of enterprise applications. The framework defines the infrastructure services that help enterprise business applications meet requirements relating to: security, accuracy, reliability, flexibility, responsiveness, and compliance.
The Cisco SONA framework facilitates enterprise-class service-oriented architecture (SOA) deployments by providing a more intelligent infrastructure in which the SOA can operate, migrating common utility functions into the network as shared services. Because the network is the one common fabric supporting the IT infrastructure components, it supports a shift to demand-based, event-driven, and real-time services in a new, consolidated data center.
