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TECHNOLOGY
71,500 EMPLOYEES
BENEFITS
• Reduced time to market for
new solutions
• Streamlined infrastructure
using containers
• Increased operational
efficiencies
• Enhanced developer
experience
• Offered a large selection of
runtimes and application
frameworks
• Helped control Java virtual
machine sprawl efficiently
with Linux containers
SOFTWARE AND SERVICES
OpenShift Enterprise
by Red Hat
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
OpenStack Platform
Red Hat JBoss® Enterprise
Application Platform
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
HARDWARE
Cisco UCS servers
Cisco networking equipment
NetApp storage solution
Cisco is a leading provider of networking solutions that transform how people connect, commu-
nicate, and collaborate. A US $47 billion global company, Cisco develops intelligent networks and
technology architectures for customers in industries ranging from government and military to
healthcare and transportation.
To help keep pace with rapidly changing customer demand, Cisco built its internal Lightweight
Application Environment on OpenShift Enterprise by Red Hat®. With this solution, Cisco IT deliv-
ers application middleware quickly and easily to internal developers through a self-service
portal. Cisco has decreased time to market for new applications, streamlined the infrastructure
using containers, increased operational efficiencies, and improved the developer experience.
HEADQUARTERS
“Using OpenShift Enterprise by Red Hat, we’ve created an end-to-end solution that
supports the entire development life cycle.”
MICHAEL WHITE
IT ARCHITECT, CISCO
San Jose, CA
CUSTOMER CASE STUDY
CISCO IMPROVES SOFTWARE AND PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT WITH OPENSHIFT ENTERPRISE BY RED HAT
2redhat.com CUSTOMER CASE STUDY Cisco improves software and product development with OpenShift Enterprise by Red Hat
CHALLENGE: SUPPORTING ‘FAST I.T.’
Supporting business technology is an ever-changing challenge — and it’s changing faster and faster.
Once a business need is identified, companies expect solution providers to deliver innovative IT
products and services without delay to gain or maintain advantage over their competitors. For
leading solution providers such as Cisco, the ability to anticipate and quickly meet customer
demand is paramount.
Taking months to roll out new software or products is no longer an option. To accelerate develop-
ment and support a new model for IT that the company refers to as “Fast IT,” Cisco switched from
a traditional waterfall software development life cycle to a more agile DevOps approach that
emphasizes ongoing communication and collaboration among developers, IT staff, and business
stakeholders alike.
Cisco needed to change the way it supported internal developers. Previously, when developers
wanted to create new applications, they had to request technology infrastructure and services from
an internal middleware architecture group. This group maintains nearly 3,000 applications that
automate or support critical business processes throughout the enterprise.
After meeting with developers to assess requirements for a project, the IT architecture team would
build a project plan and provision infrastructure for the developers a process that might take several
months. What’s more, any time the IT group developed a new middleware service, it took six months
to roll it out to the entire enterprise.
“Our group needed the ability to deploy applications quickly at low cost so our developers could get
back to delivering applications,” said Michael White, IT architect at Cisco.
SOLUTION: CREATING SELF-SERVICE DEVELOPER RESOURCES
To meet these requirements, Cisco IT worked with experts from Red Hat Consulting to design and
build its Lightweight Application Environment (LAE). It runs on OpenShift Enterprise by Red Hat,
Red Hat’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technology, which supports hundreds of applications that
power a variety of business functions for Cisco. With the LAE, Cisco developers can now easily
design and build applications while delivering the security, integrity, and manageability expected
of an enterprise infrastructure.
As part of the LAE, developers can order all their IT resources from Cisco’s internal online storefront.
This self-service portal gives developers on-demand access to the infrastructure, operating system,
middleware, and system functions they need to develop applications end to end without any manual
provisioning by the Cisco IT group. Developers can identify the hardware, virtual machines, storage,
and other resources they will use to create a new business capability. They can also specify a data-
base and specific life cycles for each asset.
“It’s a one-stop shopping catalog where all of the complexities are abstracted from the client, making
the ordering process seamless and easier for developers to use,” said Sudha Agrahara, IT manager
at Cisco.
Through the portal, the application middleware, development, and operational tools are bundled,
provisioned, and available in as few as 15 minutes―all with the push of a button. “Our e-store has
helped us reduce the development life cycle significantly,” said Amit Srivastava, manager of the
middleware architecture group in Cisco IT. “We’ve organized the services developers might need
into a service catalog, and that has been very appealing to our internal clients.”
“Having a strategic, forward-thinking
partner like Red Hat that aligns with all of our priorities is a key
part of Cisco’s success. We’re thankful to have
Red Hat as our partner.”
MICHAEL WHITE
IT ARCHITECT, CISCO
3redhat.com CUSTOMER CASE STUDY Cisco improves software and product development with OpenShift Enterprise by Red Hat
The LAE also supports the agile DevOps model. Because OpenShift Enterprise supports a variety
of open source technologies, developers can work in the language of their choice — Java™, Node.js,
Perl, Python, PHP, or Ruby. They can also choose from a broad range of frameworks, databases,
and developer tools. “Prior to OpenShift, we limited ourselves to a small number of technologies,
and it took a long time to add new ones,” said White. “OpenShift lets us provide the technologies
developers want, quickly and automatically.”
Cisco has a large deployment of Java-based services. With thousands and thousands of Java virtual
machines (JVMs), Cisco needed a better way to contain those resources. Running one JVM per
virtual machine wasn’t scalable and couldn’t meet future business needs. With OpenShift Enterprise,
the operations team could consolidate more JVMs onto a single virtual machine through the use of
Linux container technologies. And the automation helped operations achieve higher utilization of
existing infrastructure.
As part of the solution, Cisco is also investigating the use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux® OpenStack®
Platform to support native cloud applications on the LAE. “OpenStack helps the application team
think about resiliency differently,” said Srivastava. “Traditionally, we would assume that resiliency
should come from the infrastructure. When building cloud-native applications, developers can
create resiliency within the application. OpenStack offers application programming interfaces
that application teams can use.”
BENEFITS: GAINING A LEANER, MEANER ENVIRONMENT
REDUCED TIME TO MARKET
Because OpenShift Enterprise supports self-service provisioning and tooling integration, the Cisco
LAE lets developers spend less time securing infrastructure assets and more time creating new
applications, which can be deployed faster than ever.
“As we move to a DevOps model where we release faster, developers need to define custom life
cycles,” said Srivastava. “With OpenShift and the LAE, we can define those on the fly, which really
helps us to introduce new capabilities to the platform faster.”
STREAMLINED INFRASTRUCTURE USING CONTAINERS
With its new LAE, Cisco improved efficiency by deploying more applications on fewer servers, which
dramatically reduced the total infrastructure footprint. And because the LAE supports multiple tech-
nologies, Cisco reduced the number of platforms it hosted.
Cisco can also use containers to increase the density of applications packed onto a particular hard-
ware server or host. “Containers let us segment memory and processes so we can define the bound-
aries for each resource,” said Srivastava. “We can then move the applications around more flexibly
because all of the operations now live in containers.”
INCREASED OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCIES
Developers use self-serve administration features of the LAE to perform post-provisioning actions,
such as starting and stopping an application instance, viewing logs, and modifying application
configurations. They also generate reports on provisioned instances. These features significantly
reduce the number of service requests to the Cisco IT team — while increasing developer productivity
and agility.
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In addition, the LAE automates and streamlines operations, which improves efficiencies. As the
application load increases, the platform provides automatic horizontal application scaling, which
eliminates the need for operations staff to manually increase the number of application instances.
Other features allow applications to handle variable peak workload automatically, protect against
runaway resource consumption, and coexist in a multitenant environment without negative impact.
Because the LAE runs on top of Cisco’s internal private cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS),
the company can scale the platform quickly as demand increases. And because of extensibility of
OpenShift Enterprise, Cisco integrated the application services offered on the LAE with its global
routers. Cisco took advantage of the solution’s availability zones and regions to span locations
across multiple datacenters and offer its users an easy path to production.
DEVELOPMENT MADE BETTER: DEVELOPERS MADE HAPPY
Cisco’s LAE enhances the experience of its application developers by supporting DevOps, rapid
provisioning, and flexible technology choices, while maintaining high levels of enterprise-scale
security and availability. “The developers come to our service offering, push a button, and the
service is delivered within a matter of a few minutes,” said Agrahara. “We abstracted all of the
complexities from the infrastructure layer and delivered Platform-as-a-Service.”
The LAE also represents a cultural shift from an infrastructure-centric environment to one that is
focused on Cisco’s developers and customers. “Within the Cisco IT community, the LAE platform on
OpenShift has been a catalyst for innovation and progress,” said White. “We are seeing many new,
creative projects that use the open source application technologies provided. All of this aligns with
our Fast IT initiatives, which are designed to give developers what they need when they need it, so
we can best serve the business, customers, and partners.”
ABOUT CISCO
Cisco is an American multinational corporation that helps customers solve their most important
business challenges by delivering intelligent networks and technology architectures. Headquartered
in San Jose, CA, Cisco was founded in 1984.
CUSTOMER CASE STUDY Cisco improves software and product development with OpenShift Enterprise by Red Hat