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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.

Copyright © 2015 Red Hat, Inc. Red Hat, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the Shadowman logo, and JBoss are trademarks of Red Hat, Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. Linux® is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries.

The OpenStack® Word Mark and OpenStack Logo are either registered trademarks / service marks or trademarks / service marks of the OpenStack Foundation, in the United States and other countries and are used with the OpenStack Foundation’s permission. We are not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by the OpenStack Foundation or the OpenStack community.

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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