Cisco Data Center Tour

Overview Welcome to the Cisco Data Center And Operational Control Center. What follows is a guided tour of the Cisco Systems main production data center, located in San Jose, California. This entire document is 64 pages long, with 45 photographs that help bring an experience of the Data Center tour to reader. This tour is based on a series of interviews with Cisco IT data center operations managers. By reading this document you can experience a "virtual data center tour."

This description of the Cisco Data Center environment and management practices provides a good background into the inner workings of a global data center. It describes the servers, storage and network found in the Cisco production data center; but more importantly it shows:

• How Cisco IT staffs, monitors, and performs change management
• How the data center is designed to remain available despite network or power outages, and
• How the data center guards against damage from fire and earthquake.

The tour consists of nine sections. You can take the tour from start to finish, or in any order of your choice; just select where you want to start and enjoy. Links to printable PDFs of this tour are available at the end of each section, and a link to the entire document is available at the end of the tour.