Power, space, and cooling are vital commodities in data center environments. As Cisco managed through a period of explosive growth in 2007, its IT department was in demand of all three. Faced with a critical situation, a group of key decision makers saw an opportunity to transform Cisco IT into a services organization—one that could enable new business models and position the company for continued success.

This case study explains the challenges, solutions, results, next steps, and lessons learned in building a state-of-the-art data center while aligning with Cisco IT’s 6-year data center strategy including:

• Address capacity, business resiliency, and geographic risk in data center infrastructure
• Transform Cisco IT into a services organization that drives the business forward
• Demonstrate how Cisco products can be deployed to achieve a high-density footprint, virtualization, and a cloud-enabled model
• Faster provisioning of IT services (from 6 weeks to 2 days)
• Improved scalability and agility of data center infrastructure
• Active-active Metro Virtual Data Center capabilities that enable zero downtime for critical business systems
• Lower total cost of ownership for compute services

Read the Unified Computing System Powers a New Planet-Friendly Data Center Case Study