InfraStruXure Backs Up Cisco's San Jose Spyglass Center

"InfraStruXure allowed us to vastly reduce the time needed in the planning and deployment of our network operations center."

Says, Nawaz 'Nick' Ali, Project Manager, Spyglass Team Cisco Systems™ Network Management Technology Group



"Cisco Systems™ Network Management Technology Group (NMTG) provides products and solutions for managing Cisco based converged networks and services.  The NMTG Solutions Marketing Center, also known as the Spyglass Center was built to effectively demonstrate the capabilities of Cisco's network management products and solutions.  The Spyglass Center supports a service provider, an enterprise and a test network.  We test and phase in new applications or newer versions of existing applications. 

The Spyglass Center is the first showcase at Cisco to integrate network, systems, applications, and services in a single environment.  We feature a service provider operational network, an enterprise network and a Network Operations Center.  Our demonstrations on this network illustrate the end-to-end process of delivering, monitoring and managing various services. 

We designed the Spyglass Center as a 24/7 availability, mission critical facility in order to serve demonstration requests worldwide.  The NOC houses all key software components.  Our customers are both new and existing Cisco customers.  The demonstrations are solution focused and support the efforts of Cisco's sales teams and Cisco's Executive Briefing Centers located worldwide in San Jose, CA, and Bedfont Lakes, UK.

APC's Modular Approach Offers Scalability and Flexibility

We were facing several specific technology challenges.  We needed the flexibility and scalability of a truly modular approach and wanted the ability to easily add capacity as the need arises.  We didn't want to incur significant up front capital expenditures and wanted to minimize the risk of downtime.

The APC InfraStruXure architecture was completely unique in that it addressed our needs for scalability, redundancy, flexibility, and network manageability as well as offering a high level of out of the box compatibility.  InfraStruXure allowed us to vastly reduce the time needed in the planning and deployment of our network operations center.

APC's InfraStruXure allowed us to reduce the capital expenditure required to protect our Network Operations Center through its modular approach of scaling not only our battery run-time but the capacity of power modules supplied.  This right-sizing approach is similar to RAID technology in storage applications.  After all, you wouldn't go out and buy 20 terabytes of storage capacity before you needed it.  The approach of buying more capacity than necessary is what we saw with other three-phase solutions.

APC was a natural choice for us.  APC has been a partner of Cisco Systems since 1998 and has a full-time resource based at our headquarters in San Jose to assist us with specifications in the network operations center.  APC also keeps us updated on the technological developments it pioneers in NCPI space.

We are constantly evolving and changing as Cisco introduces new solutions.  We are also charged with evaluating the technological advances of Cisco's partners.  We plan to continue to work with APC to make sure the Spyglass Center is at the forefront of technology in the NCPI space.  APC has added value in helping the Spyglass Center ensure consistent uptime, which in turn provides high levels of customer satisfaction.