Cisco targets innovation with new infrastructure

By FREDRICK OBURA

NAIROBI, KENYA: Application-centric infrastructure is set to help businesses in Kenya unlock new routes to innovation and profit, Cisco says

“A new paradigm shift driven by cloud, mobility and big data is redefining IT, with the web-based economy shifting to an app-based economy,” said Sabrina Dar, Cisco General Manager East Africa.

“Today’s data center and cloud application and infrastructure requirements call for a new approach. We need solutions that are simple and that cut across different technological and organizational silos without compromising on scale, responsiveness, security and end-to-end visibility. We need solutions that deliver network automation and programmability, and we need models that are designed from the ground up to be explicitly application-centric. Bolted-on approaches are becoming a thing of the past, and the failure of companies to adapt will likely see them fall behind the competition in terms of profit and innovation.”

Directly responding to market demands, Cisco’s recently announced Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) offering is set to have a particularly significant impact on data centers through ramping up the efficiency, flexibility and speed increasingly demanded by the region’s profit-conscious business-leaders.

Complemented by associated professional services and an open partner ecosystem, Cisco is now able to deliver the first data center and cloud solution built around the needs of applications. The system offers full visibility, and integrated management of both physical and virtual networked IT resources.

Cisco’s bold launch comes as technology-focused market intelligence firm IDC predicts that service providers worldwide will continue to drive IT spend and will account for a quarter of the entire datacenter space by 2016.

The complex pressures facing datacenters was vividly highlighted in Cisco’s recent Global Cloud Index, which reported that annual global data center IP traffic, will reach 6.6 zettabytes by the end of 2016. By 2016, global data center IP traffic will reach 554 exabytes per month (up from 146 in 2011), at a compound annual growth rate of 31 per cent.

By 2016, nearly two-thirds of all data center workloads will be processed in the cloud, with annual global cloud IP traffic rising to 4.3 zettabytes. This amounts to around 355 exabytes per month (up from 57 in 2011). Overall, cloud IP traffic will have grown at a CAGR of 44 per cent from 2011 to 2016.