Cisco CloudVerse for Education: Enabling the World of many Clouds in Education
This is an overview of the paper delivered by Mr Tosin Amusan, Datacenter/Virtualization and Cloud Solution Architect at Cisco during the 3rd Education Network Conference in Lagos, Nigeria.
Global Trends in Education
Online courses expand reach and complement traditional instruction: Education institutions are increasingly looking for opportunities to expand access to educational opportunities and increasing their online course offerings. While distance and remote learning continue to be a focus, educators are also using technology in blended learning models to increase engagement for on-campus classes in order to complement traditional courses.
“Big Data” and learning analytics enable the delivery of Personalized Learning Environments
Education CIOs are increasingly being asked to deliver a platform to analyze the vast quantities of data they collect to deliver Personalized Learning Environments that integrate traditional data (data-at-rest) with unstructured data (data-in-motion) to:
Provide educators with real-time student data for differentiated instruction
Predict student performance and suggest interventions
Inform changes to curricula
Manage educator performance
Mobile devices have become primary learning tools as a result of the explosion of multiple devices and the emergence of e-textbooks
The idea that the classroom or lecture hall serves as the primary educational venue is being uprooted. Technology is broadening the opportunity for learning, making every personally owned computer, smartphone, and tablet a potential academic resource. Expand reach through virtual and online classes, global campuses, home, work, and school
Social learning and content sharing support student collaboration and educator interaction
Web 2.0 and social networking are critically important to the current generation of students. Collaboration and social learning are key to delivering the 21st century learning experience.
Schools, colleges and universities around the world are using video technologies as a fundamental agent in the process of education transformation. Interactive video enriches learning—creating global classrooms and media-rich, blended learning environments. They help to expand the reach of courses to remote learners, without compromising the quality of the educational experience.
Education Cloud Challenges and Benefits:
Education leaders are confronted with significant pressures and challenges.
-Constrained IT budgets. Budget forecasts for the foreseeable future are grim. Saving money and resources is an important concern for most schools, colleges and universities which makes cloud computing an increasingly attractive option.
-An unsustainable IT model. Education institutions have long been in an IT support crisis. Simply put, schools, colleges and universities not able to keep up with the demands for new IT services with existing staff and budgets. As a result, education IT leaders are looking to the cloud to cost-effectively deliver new academic and administrative services.
-The proliferation of mobile devices. Mobile devices are an absolute necessity for the current generation of students. The 2011 Cisco Connected World Technology Report found that two-thirds of students (66%) cite a mobile device (laptop, smartphone, tablet) as “the most important technology in their lives.” Educators at schools, colleges and universities are also embracing mobile learning and “Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) initiatives. These trends have caused many education institutions look to consider cloud-based solutions to support anytime, anywhere access to digital content by mobile users.
-Educational focus on personalizing learning. Schools, colleges and universities are increasingly focused on personalize learning, based on student needs and learning styles. Cloud applications that offer rich, multimedia content, virtual learning, and collaboration are key enablers for these education transformation initiatives.
-Next generation collaboration. Collaboration is a fundamental component of a 21st century education. Education IT leaders are increasingly challenged to provide new social platforms and are exploring opportunities to broker cloud services to enable these new education delivery models
Benefits of Cisco CloudVerse for Higher Education
-Accelerate delivery of differentiated services: Cisco CloudVerse enables institutions to quickly deploy applications that deliver coursework and lectures, help attract the best students and faculty, offer lifetime learning, reach new students beyond the campus, and increase safety and security.
-Increase agility: IT can automate management and provisioning of cloud-based services to simplify operations, save time, and help reduce costs. High scalability eliminates the time needed for purchasing and deploying additional infrastructure.
-Reduce costs: Virtualization and other features of Cisco Unified Data Center and Cisco Cloud Intelligent Network enable service delivery at a lower cost than traditional infrastructures, which allows colleges and universities to achieve the economies of scale and efficiency delivered by cloud computing.
-Reduce risk and enhance security: Cisco CloudVerse cloud security helps IT reduce risk through the Cisco SecureX Architecture, which enables consistent security policies and enforcement, up-to-date threat intelligence, greater scalability, and improved performance. Cisco cloud security helps remove cloud barriers so that higher education institutions can achieve the educational and business benefits of cloud computing.
-Reshape teaching and expand collaboration: Cisco offers a portfolio of cloud services, such as Cisco WebEx and Cisco TelePresence, that can expand the learning environment to anyone, anywhere, and provide faculty and students with a rich, interactive eLearning environment. These cloud services can also help institutions control IT costs, manage energy expenses, and reduce travel time and costs.
Cisco CloudVerse for Education
Schools, colleges and universities are looking for cloud solutions to solve some of their biggest business and technology challenges: reducing costs, creating new levels of efficiency, and facilitating innovative business models that drive revenue growth. Cisco believes that each customer and situation requires a different cloud solution: some private, some public, some consuming services, some communities integrating multiple clouds together. The challenge and opportunity of the world of many clouds is to bring together cloud computing, the network, and storage, spread across many clouds comprised of thousands upon thousands of content/data that must work together on-demand and securely.
Cisco has the network platform that enables the cloud (within the cloud/DC, between clouds, and beyond to the customer) and compute DNA along with
an ecosystem of partners to enable this world of many clouds working together.
When implemented successfully, the cloud will allow cloud providers to tightly align technology to business priorities; service providers to deliver new services and content to their customers; governments and emerging countries to consolidate and advance technology faster; and consumers to instantly access new services.
There is a huge opportunity here for service providers, so let’s talk about what we’re finding.
Cisco’s cloud strategy is to enable our customers to offer cloud services (and applications) by providing them with solutions for private, public and hybrid clouds that uniquely combine the unified data center and the cloud intelligent network and enable the delivery of cloud services. Underlying this strategy are three strategic pillars:
Provide the essential architectures, solutions and integrated systems for customers building clouds: public, private and hybrid. These include our highly differentiated products such as our unified computing system, our switching and routing products such as Nexus and CRS/ASR/ISR, our cloud enabling services (WaaS, Ace) which radically simplify the building of the cloud infrastructure.
Cisco works closely with best-of-breed partners, to provide fully-tested, Integrated solutions for customers deploying cloud services. Cisco’s industry leading partners include BMC, CA, EMC, NetApp, Oracle, RedHat, VMware, VCE and others. Together we offer customer a choice of complete solutions which dramatically reduce the time for an enterprise or service provider to deploy cloud services
Cisco simplifies and accelerate the use of cloud services by providing capabilities to rapidly offer users cloud services. Cisco provides solutions for our customers to deliver cloud services like Collaboration Cloud, Video Delivery, Infrastructure as a service, VXI, security-as-a-service and others. Customers want to access cloud services through a variety of different devices not just their desktops – telepresence, tablets, virtual desktops – all relying on the network
These pillars work closely together to enable Cisco to best serve our customers in their journey to the cloud and to spur the growth of the overall cloud market.
Cisco complements these solutions and services with a comprehensive portfolio of cloud enablement services to rapidly design, stand up and manage cloud solutions. Cisco’s approach directly addresses this issue by providing higher-level building blocks for cloud providers, whether private, public, or hybrid.
Cisco CloudVerse brings together Cisco’s leading Cloud Capabilities, Services and Solutions in an integrated platform combining:
Cloud Applications and Services:
Collaboration: Collaboration, TP 2.0, Webex
Video: Videoscape, Medianet
3rd Party Cloud Services: Over 50 certified IT applications and services that are pre-tested for CloudVerse
Unified Data Center
UCS, B, C, UCS Manager
Nexus Family Routing and switching
Cloud Platform Management (Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud, Cisco Network Services Manager(Overdrive))
Cloud Intelligent Network
Cloud intelligent network further enhances the enterprise networks (Borderless networks) and SP networks (IP NGN) for cloud with new capabilities:
Cloud to Customer Connect: Delivery of services/content from the cloud to the consumer assured by network security, quality of service and application/content acceleration
Cloud to Cloud Connect: Interconnect solutions between data centers and clouds Enhanced with layer 2 through 7 capabilities
Evolving the Cisco Unified Data Center
Unified Data Center is a critical element of Cisco’s CloudVerse, bringing together the Data Center with Cisco’s Cloud Intelligent Network to deliver a great cloud experience for our customers that want to leverage a world of many clouds.
Unified Data brings together Cisco Unified Fabric, Unified Computing and our new Unified Management to deliver the best platform for delivering IT as a Service.
Unified Data Center delivers an architectural approach that helps customers move from legacy IT architecture and management to a new model that delivers business agility, financial efficiency and IT simplification.
Unified Data Center extends our existing Data Center portfolio, which continues to gain market-share, and introduces the next stage in helping customers move from Physical to Virtual to Cloud based environments.
Unified Data Center enables significantly better economics within the Data Center:
– 30% lower costs
– 90% faster deployment times
– 30-40% faster application performance
– 60% lower power/cooling
Cisco Unified Management
Simplifying Automation, Orchestration and Cloud
A single Unified Management solution is fully integrated and offers new ways to simplify cloud application delivery. Moreover, it works with legacy systems and easily integrates with existing OSS and BSS systems. Cisco’s solution is comprised of:
Cisco Intelligent Automate for Cloud (CIAC): which offers on-demand provisioning combining a self-service portal and orchestration capabilities using an advanced service catalogue and new ways to integrate and automate functions across the cloud that simply set up and management of complex cloud applications.
One of the major challenges of cloud provisioning is managing compute, storage and underlying network resources in a way that facilitates dynamic reallocation as the needs of individual applications scale up or down or are turned off or on.
CIAC combines the power of the UCS Manager and the newly announced Cisco Network Services Manager to dynamically manage both physical and virtual resources for resource pooling and management while automating new capabilities using a model-based approach that replaces a script and template approach which is inherently less flexible and more static.
Cisco CloudVerse
Unified Data Center—Cloud Economic Advantage
Cisco CloudVerse generates significant economic benefits for customer whether they are building private, public or hybrid clouds or consuming cloud applications and services.
Let’s take Cisco’s own experience as a great example of the benefits cloud can bring to a business.
When Cisco moved from a traditional DC to a virtualized data center it reduced our total cost of ownership (opex+capex) by 37%.
With Cisco Unified Computing and the automation benefits of UCS manager cloud transforms how IT meets business needs, enabling IT as a service. Reducing average server TCO another 27%, and server provisioning time reduced from days/weeks to 15 minutes
With the new capabilities announced in Cisco CloudVerse – CIAC, Cisco-NSM, NPS and others, we expect Cisco IT will have an additional 33% of TCO savings. These benefits apply to both private and public clouds build with CloudVerse. Overall CloudVerse bring an additional 50% of Tco benefit to a virtualized data center.This shows why Cloud is such a compelling economic benefit – and why customers are moving IT applications and services to the cloud.
Useful Resources:
http://www.ciscowebtools.com/cloud
Cisco CloudVerse
Cisco Education
Cisco Services for Education
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps11785/serv_group_home.html
Cisco Cloud Profile Tool
Cisco Cloud Enablement Services
www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps11104/serv_home.html
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