System Architecture

As part of our Systems Architecture Practice, Nortech delivers world-class solutions that meet the unique business and technology requirements of our clients. From strategic consulting and design to implementation and support, Nortech develops and executes custom-tailored solutions that address your current business and financial challenges. We partner with industry leaders to deliver comprehensive, integrated solutions that result in measurable cost savings, increased productivity and business flexibility.

The Nortech Systems Architecture Practice Area includes:

Collaboration:

Cisco will broaden its emphasis on collaboration tools, make video pervasive, and integrate these tools into networks.

New business collaboration tools help people work together to solve problems, make decisions, reduce and avoid costs, accelerate time to market, and transform entire industries faster, no matter how far apart the participants happen to be.

Realize Three Types of Return on Investment

Busness collaboration tools are changing the way we think about working together, to deliver returns on investment from operational, productivity, and strategic perspectives.

collaboration

Operational ROI
Business collaboration helps you change the way you operate by reducing or avoiding travel, infrastructure, energy, and office space costs. Operational ROI is usually the first and most accessible area in which you show gains. It is possible to achieve 100% ROI in 5 years and payback periods of 21-40 months.

Productivity ROI
Speeding time to market requires making well-informed decisions quickly. To move your business forward faster, business collaboration technologies can help you improve the product-development process or take time out of the sales cycle. Increasing employee productivity is the next great performance challenge and a major opportunity.

Strategic ROI
Transform your company. Strengthen customer satisfaction and loyalty, reinvent the concept of customer service, develop entirely new business models, and enter new markets with built in competitive advantage. While strategic ROI may be the hardest to measure, it can also be the most transformative.

Virtualization and Data Center:

With its unified computing platform and new server products, Cisco deepens its entry to virtualization and data center markets, posing a threat to the vendors who’ve traditionally held greater market share.

 

Move Beyond Infrastructure Maintenance

As enterprise computing systems increase in scale, they also increase in complexity. And as complexity increases, so does the expense of deployment and ongoing management.

Today, more than 70 percent of IT budget is spent simply to maintain and manage existing infrastructure (Source: Forrester, December 2008). The result: IT organizations must continually increase resources to maintain a complex and inflexible infrastructure versus using them to rapidly and effectively respond to business needs.

IT organizations are looking for ways to substantially decrease cost of ownership while increasing IT business value. The Cisco Unified Computing System helps address these challenges by streamlining data center resources, scaling service delivery, and radically reducing the number of devices requiring setup, management, power/cooling, and cabling.

Bridge the Divide Between IT and Business Needs

The Cisco Unified Computing System can deliver the following benefits:

  • Reduce total cost of ownership at the platform, site, and organizational levels
  • Increase IT staff productivity and business agility through just-in-time provisioning and mobility support for both virtualized and non-virtualized environments
  • Enable scalability through a design for up to 320 discrete servers and thousands of virtual machines in a single highly available management domain
  • Use industry standards supported by a partner ecosystem of innovative, trusted industry leaders

Separate Scale From Complexity

As a next-generation data center platform, the Cisco Unified Computing System:

  • Unites computing, networking, storage access, and virtualization into a cohesive system
  • Integrates a low-latency, lossless 10 Gigabit Ethernet unified network fabric with enterprise-class, x86-architecture servers

This approach separates scale from complexity. Whether the system has 1 server or 320 servers with thousands of virtual machines, all resources participate in a unified management domain designed to:

  • Reduce total cost of ownership at the platform, site, and organizational levels
  • Increase IT staff productivity and business agility through just-in-time provisioning and mobility support

Simplified Management

Enable rapid provisioning of applications and infrastructure from shared pools of computing, storage, and network resources; enable rapid provisioning and scaling of IT infrastructure through unified, model-based management powered by Cisco service profiles.

Industry Recognition

Hear what analysts have to say about Cisco Unified Computing System and learn more about this award winning architecture.

Borderless Network:

Cisco’s core area of routing and switching is evolving into “next-generation routing and switching,” including Cisco WAAS WAN optimization.

How You Benefit

By connecting people, information, and devices securely, reliably, and seamlessly, Cisco Borderless Networks can help you:

  • Protect assets and mitigate risks
  • Maintain business continuity
  • Achieve growth through productivity

Read the Borderless Networks At a Glance. (PDF - 125 KB)

Calculate the Benefits

Read commissioned studies by Forrester Consulting to better understand the quantifiable costs, savings, and benefits of deploying Cisco Borderless Networks:

The following business calculators can help you understand your potential return on investment (ROI):