Cloud

Some people are perfectly happy buying and eating pre-made microwaveable meals. These meals are rarely amazing. They’re never innovative. But they’re quick, perfectly consistent, and they get the job done. The only flexibility on the part of the consumer is which pre-made meal to pick. The decisions…

Many enterprises today want to build a private cloud to gain efficiencies such as on-demand service delivery and pay-as-you-go use of IT infrastructure services, all while maintaining control, accountability, and data sovereignty. There are two ways an organization can realize the benefits of cloud.…

Most of you who’ve either purchased or delivered cloud services have been asked for an SLA (Service Level Agreement). I’ve seen SLAs that can be measured on inches of paper.  Why so big? Just consider getting 10 people in a room and trying to write down the definition of what it means for an applica…

Customers frequently ask how to avoid a “wild wild west” situation as they move from tightly-controlled traditional infrastructure to the self-service, highly abstracted model that Cisco OpenStack® Private Cloud provides. They have concerns over quality assurance, security, costs, resource utilizati…

When used wisely, consuming cloud as-a-service (aaS) can dramatically improve business outcomes. Primarily, cloud IT services can promote business agility, reduce expenses, and accelerate time-to-market. They also can provide access to highly trained professionals with focused technical expertise, s…

We talk to customers all the time that want to move to OpenStack, but the tools and processes they rely on just aren’t ready. Or the policies around their applications or data don’t support a true self-service cloud. Not wanting to be stuck with VMware for the rest of their lives, we ta…

“In our collective eagerness to talk about our growing list of cloud offerings, emerging cloud strategies, and contributions to the cloud community, we all started blogging from different places. The data center folks were talking about Cisco’s cloud-optimized hardware on one blog, the open so…

Some of you may remember Marathon Man, starring Lawrence Olivier as the evil Nazi dentist Dr. Christian Szell, and Dustin Hoffman as a graduate student nicknamed Babe. Szell has come to New York from his South American jungle hideaway to retrieve a cache of diamonds, but he’s not sure he won’t be wa…

I hate it when I have to miss a podcast. And I don’t miss many. But this week I was in New York for customer meetings so I had to miss OpenStack Podcast #25, featuring Ryan Floyd of Storm Ventures! Such a shame. It was a good interview too. For those of you who don’t know, Ryan was one o…