The Cisco Intelligent Information Network (IIN) is a multi-phased architecture that injects intelligence into a network’s infrastructure. This multi-phased approach integrates the network with applications, software, servers, and services, using a single integrated system to provide intelligence across multiple layers and to align the network infrastructure with the rest of the IT infrastructure. In other words, the network becomes an active participant in the total delivery of applications and services. Cisco considers this an evolving environment (or ecosystem) that responds to constantly changing business requirements. The IIN has three main capabilities:
- Integrated system: The network is integrated with the applications and services.
- Active delivery: The network fully participates in the monitoring, the management, and the optimization of service delivery and applications.
- Policy enforcement: The network enforces policies that allow it to reach business goals and that link business processes and network rules and procedures.
The IIN is a three-phase evolutionary approach that includes the following:
1. Integrated transport: This is the convergence of data, voice, and video in a single transport network. An example of this is Cisco’s Unified Communications platform. As new applications are delivered, they are placed into the infrastructure for integrated transport. For example, unified messaging integrates voice messaging, e-mail, text, and voice recording.
2. Integrated services: These represent the merger of common components, such as data center server capacity or storage, and virtualization technologies that allow the integration of servers, storage, and network components. By virtualizing systems with redundant resources, the network infrastructure can offer services if the local network fails, as well as enhance disaster recovery and business continuity.
3. Integrated applications: At this level the network becomes fully application-aware and it can proactively optimize application performance by integrating application message handling, application security, and application optimization. Cisco calls this integrated application technology Application-Oriented Networking (AON).