Cisco Gives Hybrid Cloud Computing a Lift

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For at least for some period of time, the future of hybrid computing is indeed hybrid, but actually making that happen presents a set of complex challenges that make building and managing hybrid clouds fairly complex.

Looking to reduce that complexity, Cisco today at the Cisco Live! event in Milan unfurled Cisco InterCloud, a framework for porting the compute, network and storage fabric used to support an application workload and then moving it across different clouds.

Compatible with APIs from public cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Rackspace, Cisco has also recruited private cloud service providers such as BT, Telstra, Savvis a CenturyLink Company, and Virtustream to support InterCloud.

Fabio Gori, senior director of cloud marketing for Cisco, says InterCloud represents a concerted effort to make sure that hybrid cloud computing is not only more feasible for most organizations, but also ensure that no customer can get locked into a particular cloud service.

Leveraging OpenStack cloud management and Project OpenDaylight controller technologies, Gori says InterCloud allows organizations to move workloads between any hypervisor running on a public or private cloud.

As part of this commitment to openness, Cisco today also unveiled the Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure (APIC) Enterprise Module, which extends the management reach of the APIC management framework that Cisco released outside the data center last year. As such, IT organizations will be able to develop management policies that can be applied across hybrid cloud computing environments involving multiple data centers. Cisco also announced that organizations have the option of invoking those software-defined networking (SDN) capabilities either through an API or a command line interface (CLI).

Finally, Cisco also released version 4.0 of its Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud software, which provides enhanced service catalog features for ordering, provisioning and managing physical and virtual servers and switches in the cloud.

As a set of enabling technologies that lay the foundation for Cisco’s vision of Internet of Everything, Cisco InterCloud and APIC controllers give IT organizations significantly more control over hybrid cloud computing deployments. In fact, as IT gains more control over the application workloads running in the cloud, it will soon become increasingly difficult to determine exactly where one data center picks up and another leaves off.