Cisco Systems Inc. is expanding its line of cloud technologies including one it calls a “breakthough hybrid cloud solution.”
Called InterCloud, the upcoming application will support hybrid clouds by allowing organizations to combine and move data and applications across different public or private clouds what maintaining linked network and security policies.
“Cloud workload portability will deliver immense benefits to cloud providers and cloud customers, paving the way toward an open and highly secure cloud ecosystem that delivers greater levels of agility, transparency, and speed of deployment,” Rob Lloyd, Cisco’s president of development and sales, said in a statement.
A number of international cloud providers have signed onto InterCloud, including CenturyLink Technology Solutions (whose Canadian division had until this month been called Savvis), BT, CSC/Service Mesh and Virtustream.
About to go into field trials, InterCloud has also been designed to move workloads to and from multiple public clouds including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Windows Azure.
InterCloud will be sold as a standalone application, although it will be work with its IAC cloud management platform. (IAC 4.0 was also announced today. See below) Red Hat has signed on to integrate InterCloud into CloudForms, and CSC/ServiceMesh intends to add it to its Agility Platforms. Cisco hopes other partners will add integration into their cloud stacks.
Equipment and software makers agreeing to support InterCloud include EMC, Citrix, Denali Advanced Integration, Microsoft, NetApp, Rackspace, VCE and Zerto.
Industry analyst Zeus Kerravala of ZK Research noted in an interview that most organizations today want to have a hybrid cloud strategy that allows them to shift workloads between an on-premise data centre and a cloud provider. InterCloud will allow data to move data freely between clouds, giving customers more flexibility in deploying workloads than they had before.
A company spokesman said InterCloud will be available to customers in the second quarter, either direct or though Cisco partners. Pricing was not announced.
Also announced today at Cisco Live Milan
–Cisco Cloud Consumption Services, a consulting service to help unlock the benefits and manage the risks of hidden cloud usage;
–Cisco Domain Ten 2.0, a framework for IT transformation which helps companies evaluate their business priorities and readying to develop a cloud strategy
–Cisco Services for OpenStack, to help organizations with OpenStack cloud deployments.
The new version of Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (IAC) cloud management platform adds an enhanced service catalog features for ordering, provisioning and managing the lifecycle of any type of IT service 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.
There’s also new functionality of virtual network services through the integration with the Cisco Prime Network Services Controller. In addition, with IAC 4.0 customers will be able to orchestrate multiple cloud environments including Amazon EC2, OpenStack and VMware.
Combined with InterCloud, Cisco [Nasdaq: CSCO] says IAC will enable new hybrid cloud management use cases such as advanced application placement, policy driven workload mobility and consistent service lifecycle governance across many clouds.