Easy to Build, Easy to Manage: Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud

What if a private cloud could give your developers the easy, fast, and predictable experience that public cloud delivers, but inside your own data center, behind your own firewalls? It’s what more and more companies are looking to provide.

Different clouds for different crowds

Innovative organizations are increasingly deploying two modes of IT — traditional IT and agile IT. Traditional IT is what we’ve all know. The focus is on “doing IT right,” with approval-based governance, and price-for-performance. Agile IT is focused on “doing IT fast,” supporting prototyping and iterative development, rapid delivery, continuous, and value to the business. Gartner calls this model “bimodal IT” and estimates that 45% of CIO’s already deploy a second, agile mode of IT.

Cisco has a long history of providing infrastructure for traditional enterprise private cloud environments. In fact, we lead the industry with Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure solutions such as vBlock Systems, Flexpod, and VersaStack. With the acquisition of Metacloud in September 2014, we now offer an agile IT environment for developers.

Enter Metacloud

The Metacloud product, now available worldwide as Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud, delivers the engineering and ongoing operations to provide a public cloud experience within the firewalls in an organization. The advanced operations subscription to Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud takes the burden of engineering and operations of the private cloud environment away from your teams, so they can focus on automating the testing, deployment, and scale of your applications.

Metacloud solved the challenges of running a sophisticated OpenStack® private cloud that delivers an easy, fast, predictable “public cloud-like” experience to developers. But under our original model customers are still left with the challenge of building an OpenStack private cloud—cobbling together the data center components of your private cloud, using traditional IT models for getting those set up and configured.

The missing piece

Today, we are announcing a bundle for Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud that will radically simplify the process of getting started with Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud in our customers’ data centers. This bundle delivers the same easy, fast, and predictable experience to the data center and infrastructure teams that we already provide to developers.

The bundle includes what we refer to as the “controller environment” – the compute, storage, routing, and switching components where Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud run, and the pieces that turn the capacity in your private cloud in to an on-demand resource for your teams to consume. It also includes the advanced operations subscription service that the Metacloud team pioneered to run your private cloud.

Open, yet opinionated

In the spirit of OpenStack, we’ve taken a very open, modular approach to how we’ve created this bundle for Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud. As I mentioned above, the bundle includes the “controller” portion of your cloud and the SaaS-delivered operations service subscription. We’ve been prescriptive about the hardware in the controller bundle so that we can simplify your installation and give our customers a more consistent experience. Our goal was easy, fast, and predictable ̶ and we’ve absolutely delivered on that.

Inside the bundle you’ll find a Cisco tested and engineered combination of Cisco Nexus 9000 switches, Cisco ASR routers, and Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) technologies that are built to support next generation cloud networking technologies and set you up to seamlessly take advantage of Intercloud-connected services and solutions in the future. Getting the controller configuration “right” for our customers is the most critical part of successfully building the data center components of your private cloud and it’s where we need to be highly opinionated if we’re going to promise you extremely high SLA’s.

Where you’ll make the biggest investment in your private cloud is on the capacity and that’s where we wanted to make sure you had choice. Select the compute and storage capacity that best meets the needs of your business and workloads. Even existing compute and storage infrastructure investments from other vendors can generally be added. As long as it meets some minimum specifications, you’ll be able to plug those new servers in to the Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud bundle (the controller) and our teams will take over from there— remotely installing our software on those new nodes and adding it as usable capacity in your private cloud for your end-users to consume and provision for their applications.

Many customers and partners have asked for Cisco-validated, UCS-powered capacity options for Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud, and we have configurations available for customers wishing to run on an all Cisco “stack.”

In Closing

As Metacloud, we were able to solve for the problem of managing and operating a public cloud experience for your developers in-house. Now, as part of Cisco, we’ve solved the challenge of building your OpenStack private cloud with the same fast, easy, and predictable results.

Read more about our announcements at Cisco Partner Summit 2015 in blogs from Nick Earle and Edison Peres.

For more information on Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud, click here or contact your Cisco representative or partner.