Cisco announced it has extended its cloud portfolio with new products and services – including a hybrid cloud solution, dubbed Cisco InterCloud, intended to facilitate more interoperable and highly secure public, private and hybrid clouds.
Along with InterCloud, Cisco is shipping a range of cloud management products, including Cisco Validated Design (CVD) for Cisco/Red Hat integrated Cloud, Management and Provisioning, Cisco Services for Cloud Strategy, Management, and Operations, Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (IAC) 4.0.
"As brokers of IT services, organizations can add value by dynamically combining, integrating, and tailoring the delivery of cloud services – whether public, private, or hybrid – to best meet their business needs,” said Robert Lloyd, Cisco president of development and sales. The latest announcement, he added, is a step toward “cloud workload portability,” intended to help in the creation of a more “open and highly secure cloud ecosystem that delivers greater levels of agility, transparency, and speed of deployment."
Cisco InterCloud, part of the Cisco One platform, is infrastructure software that will support hybrid clouds by allowing organizations to combine and move workloads – including data and applications – across different public or private clouds as needed, easily and very securely, while maintaining associated network and security policies.
By deploying Cisco InterCloud, enterprises and cloud providers will be able to create an interoperable and highly secure hybrid cloud environment across multiple public and private clouds and between premises-based applications and public clouds while maintaining associated network and security policies. On-demand flexibility and workload portability will allow organizations to cost-effectively select their optimal cloud strategy.
As part of its Cisco Validated Design initiative, Cisco says it is working with Red Hat are working together on several key initiatives to extend OpenStack and enable open, interoperable cloud environments. These include Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings designed to allow customers to manage both legacy and web-scale cloud environments. For example, the companies are
integrating Cisco Prime network management and the Cisco IAC Service Catalog with the Red Hat OpenShift platform to provide dynamic scaling, tenant-level security, and integrated management and provisioning.
Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud 4.0 is designed to help deliver a cloud management solution for enterprises and cloud service providers to deploy private, public, or hybrid clouds. This new software release provides enhanced service catalog features for ordering, provisioning and managing the lifecycle of a variety of IT services from a self-service portal. New integration between Cisco IAC and Cisco UCS Director provides the ability to rapidly provision both virtual and physical infrastructure for cloud deployments on Cisco UCS and Nexus, as well as third-party hardware.
More information is available at the Cisco website.