Cisco Expands its Intercloud Ecosystem

Cisco announced major milestones and next steps for its Intercloud initiative — a globally connected network of clouds — saying that it now has 65 partners running Intercloud Fabric in over 350 data centers. The aim of Cisco Intercloud is to reduce complexity out of hybrid clouds.

Some Intercloud highlights:

Recent enhancements to Cisco Intercloud are focused in the areas of security, control, and expanded hypervisor support, including OpenStack, KVM and Microsoft Hyper-V.
Cisco has signed up 35 independent software vendors (ISVs) to accelerate the creation of innovative cloud services for the Intercloud.
At Cisco Live!, 10 Intercloud partners—Cirrity, Datalink, iland, Long View, Peak 10, Presidio, QTS, Quest, Sungard Availability Services and Virtustream—announced new hybrid cloud services built on Cisco Intercloud Fabric. Cisco also announced that KPIT Technologies, Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, and the Salvation Army are using Cisco Intercloud Fabric to implement a single operational model across dev/test, quality assurance and production environments.
Cisco is planning to open an Intercloud Marketplace —- a partner-centric global storefront for Intercloud-based applications and cloud services from Cisco and partners. The first wave of new Cisco Intercloud Marketplace application developers and service partners include: ActiveState, Apprenda, Basho, Chef, Citrix, CliQr, Cloud Enabled, CloudBerry Lab, Cloudera, Cloudify, CloudLink, Couchbase, CTERA, Datadog, Davra Networks, desktopsites, Druva, Egnyte, ElasticBox, F5 Networks, Hortonworks, Informatica, MapR, MongoDB, Moonwalk, Nirmata, Panzura, Pegasystems, Platfora, Sanovi, ScaleArc, Skytree, StoAmigo, Talisen Technologies and Zenoss. Intercloud Marketplace launch is targeted for fall of 2015.
Cisco is expanding its participation in leading open source developer communities like Cloud Foundry, OpenShift and Kubernetes. To help developers to build container-based micro-services, Cisco is building an integrated toolset for continuous integration and deployment. By providing developers with access to the latest APIs and micro-services across all Cisco cloud, IoE and big data technologies delivered through the Intercloud, Cisco is extending its focus on embracing and enabling its developer community via its DevNet initiative.
Cisco Intercloud Fabric now extends its zone-based firewall services to support Microsoft Azure. Cisco Intercloud Fabric Firewall solves the problem of securing traffic between virtual machines without redirecting this traffic to the edge firewall for lookup by including a zone-based firewall, the Cisco Virtual Security Gateway (VSG). With VSG support in Cisco Intercloud Fabric, customers who use the VSG for the Cisco Nexus® 1000V Series Switch in their enterprise data center can extend the same policies to the VSG instance in the public cloud. This allows them to have consistent firewall policies across their entire hybrid cloud infrastructure.
Cisco is now extending its VM onboarding to support Amazon VPC. Cisco Intercloud Fabric is designed to make the onramp to hybrid cloud easier. Its VM onboarding capabilities allows businesses to easily extend management to VMs already deployed in a public cloud by identifying pre-existing target VMs and moving them under Intercloud Facric control.
Cisco Intercloud Fabric now supports OpenStack, KVM and Microsoft Hyper-V. A business’ ability to choose the right cloud for the right workload should not be limited by the underlying infrastructure or in this case, the hypervisor. Business requirements do not care which hypervisor a public cloud uses. Operational models are better served if all public clouds are treated the same. With support for VMware vSphere, OpenStack KVM, and Microsoft Hyper-V, Cisco Intercloud Fabric now supports the vast majority of hypervisor deployments.