You are about to see a fantastic demo. I have divided this post into two parts: The Science and the Art.
The Science
The following demonstration puts a pragmatic face to self-service cloud operations. It provides both the "Front Office" view and the "Factory" view so you can see how this new fangled world is LIKE and NOT LIKE the existing world.
First, we see a Service Provicer administrator (Giri) contract, design and deploy a set of virtual datacenters at different service levels from a single screen. He provisions compute, apps, network and storage services.So it is like what we do today, but rather than requiring a bunch of silos, meetings, documents it's all done instantly. So it's ITSM done agile.
The key is strong standardization coupled with converged infrastructure from NetApp and Cisco with Vmware's vCloud DIrector providing the datacenter abstration.
This new way leans heavily in abstracting operations through the creation of standardized technical service offerings, which then get aggregated. choreographed and consumed as a larger service offering in the Cisco Cloud Portal (ex-newScale).
You then get to see how the Factory in NetApp and vCloud deploying the requested datacenters in minutes.
This is then followed by a different end user who needs an Oracle Financials environment - could be for test, development, performance testing, training, auditing, or even production.
The newScale catalog guides the user through all the proper questions to deploy the user's infrastructure.
The Art of service catalog
As you watch the demo, you'll see the screens ask certain questions of the person on-boarding the tenant. The choices provided maybe unfamiliar to some. The choices may be too restrictive for others.
This is where the art and science of service catalog meet. The set of questions and choices need to be appropriate to the role of the user, in this case an administrator for a service provider. And they need to balance the need for simplification so a customer can choose with ease and confidence, with the need for sufficient flexibility to accomodate different needs.
This is where the science of technology meets the art of marketing and customer knowledge. By definition, standard offerings remove choices in exchange for agility and cost-savings.
Where the service catalog software begins to shine is that we may take the same underlying technical service offerings, and package them for a different audience with a completely different set of choices and questions appropriate for that customer.
For example, we could decide our customer is the telecom facilities manager in charge of deploying voice-over-IP telephones plus video conferencing. We could then ask questions about the number of phones and video rooms, the size and quality requirements, etc, etc. Those questions and choices, are then translated into the technical specifications that drive the configuration vCloud, NetApp and Cisco UCS. Including deploying the proper telephony and video infrastructure for that application.
So don't get stuck on choices and questions in this demo, they will vary depending on the audience, role and application requirements. Instead of your mileage may vary, your service catalog experience wil may vary.
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