September 4, 2014 1 Comment
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Data Center

Cisco UCSO – A solution whose name length is second only to the list of customer benefits

Open source software is driving innovation in mobile devices and platforms, cloud services, big data and social technologies, as it continues to shape next generation data center architectures.  Specifically, interest in OpenStack has been growing: IT organizations are looking for new ways to increase efficiency and have expressed preference for a more agile, modular and vendor neutral approach to building cloud platforms.

Today, to capitalize on these important trends, Cisco and Red Hat announced that we will be building upon the strong success we have had with Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (REHL).  Cisco and Red Hat will accelerate joint engineering and product development around three additional key technology areas:  OpenStack, Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and the Intercloud. Cisco and Red Hat offer customers a broad and robust portfolio of integrated solutions for data center modernization, true hybrid cloud and big data. To gain more insights regarding the breadth of our alliance activities with Red Hat you can read Denny Trevett’s blog .

At the Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) Launch Event in New York City, we have announced a powerful array of new computing  solutions and we also have introduced the initial phase and offering of this expanded relationship: UCS Integrated Infrastructure for Red Hat OpenStack or as some like to call it for short: UCSO. This offering is the combination of the Industry leading UCS Integrated Infrastructure with the Industry Leading Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform into a set of solutions – with accompanying Bill of Materials (BOM), 24×7 Solution Support and Professional Services – based on Cisco and Red Hat Validated Designs to accelerate the deployment of OpenStack-based clouds.  With Cisco UCSO, mid-market and enterprise customers will be able to lower the risk associated with their cloud deployments while retaining control and choice over their environments with open and interoperable cloud architectures.

While adoption of OpenStack has been growing, customers continue to express concerns about the enterprise readiness of OpenStack, its ability to provide a complete solution and potential complexity of deployment.  By partnering with Red Hat and offering Cisco UCSO – which is backed by our professional services – Cisco and Red Hat will be able to address many of these concerns. Red Hat’s excellent track record in the open source community can provide our joint customers with the performance, scalability, and security they need for their private or hybrid cloud deployment. If you want to learn more about Red Hat OpenStack capabilities I would encourage you to read this blog or check out this video.

With Cisco Intercloud Fabric, ACI, and OpenStack, we take a leadership role in network services integration with Cloud technologies. In the future, Cisco UCSO will progressively leverage these capabilities to enable highly secure Intercloud portability of workloads across heterogeneous environments with consistent network and security policies.

‘Cloud-native’ applications (e.g., applications that are architected and designed to run on Cloud) represent ideal use cases for UCSO. Development and test of new applications, proof of concept implementations and workloads in a private IaaS environment are often brought-up during our initial customer conversations.

Our cloud strategy relies on our intent to offer the power of choice to our customers. Cisco’s commitment to open, interoperable and standards-based cloud solutions has been unwavering. In fact, Cisco has been a very active member of the OpenStack community and by partnering with Red Hat we can bring OpenStack to the enterprise, with confidence and without compromises.

In order to eliminate any barriers for adoption, Cisco Cloud Consulting Services will enable organizations to deploy the infrastructure and configure OpenStack in a short period of time. They will also provide the option for deploying customized Cloud capabilities and integrating with existing tools and processes leveraging prior experiences and best practices.

With a growing number of UCS integrated infrastructure solutions for Red Hat OpenStack, we will provide our customers with enterprise grade, foundational building blocks to modernize their IT operational models, processes and technologies to accommodate new cloud-scale workloads and related requirements while achieving:

• Accelerated Deployment Times – For organizations that need to more quickly deploy cloud solutions to address business needs.

• Lower Cost – For organizations that want to increase operational efficiency associated with cloud deployments by leveraging open source solutions.

• Lower Risk – For organizations that need to lower the risk associated with their cloud projects while avoiding proprietary vendor solutions.

• Increase Portability – For organizations that need to implement cloud strategies that include a combination of Private, Public and Hybrid clouds with seamless interconnection among the various deployment models and full portability of workloads.

• Accelerate ROI – Cisco Cloud Consulting Services can provide expertise for deployment and configuration of OpenStack environments in a short period of time.

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