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Many organizations struggle with managing an increasingly complex IT infrastructure, while keeping their businesses innovative and agile. As a consequence, enterprises began migrating workloads to public cloud providers, only to discover a new set of constraints such as security, data sovereignty, industry regulations, and meeting performance requirements for their business-critical applications. The result has been a more balanced approach of deploying hybrid and multicloud environments that include running applications and workloads on private and public clouds.

To help IT simplify the management of their infrastructure, the private cloud environments should provide many of the same benefits and conveniences offered by traditional public cloud providers, such as a pay-per-use operating expense model with the ability to scale when needed. Easier said than done.

That is until now. Cisco and IBM Services have partnered to offer a Managed Private Cloud-as-a-service for x86 that is powered by Cisco UCS. There are two “flavors” of this fully managed private cloud: A standard VMware-based solution, and a RedHat OpenShift-based solution.

This is a fully managed offering delivered by IBM Services that provides the consumption and utility of a public cloud but delivered on premise. There are no huge capital outlays, no surprise pricing, and no long-term commitments.

In addition, the service is provided by one of the industry’s most trusted cloud and managed service providers – IBM. They are one of only five certified Cisco Global Gold partners with strong local and global expertise. IBM’s history of providing innovation and transformation with our joint customers made them a natural partner in this space.

As a fully managed service, IBM not only installs and manages the compute environment, they also provide tools for support and enhancement requests. In addition, the offering places a high priority on security, proactive monitoring, and reporting. To provide this solution, IBM leverages Cisco Intersight and its own decades of experience in managing customer infrastructure.

By combining the best of Cisco’s data center portfolio and IBM Services, together the two companies deliver an on and off premises private cloud to our customers in a way that reduces risk, complexity, and provides an un-paralleled experience. Ultimately, customers gain the flexibility to grow their businesses un-encumbered by IT constraints.

IBM Services will be showcasing the solution at Cisco Live Barcelona. Feel free to stop by the IBM booth for a demo and presentation of the fully managed private cloud solution.