Cisco and IBM Cloud Announce Hybrid Cloud Partnership

In the current day journey towards application modernization, enterprises have a growing need to not only bring together the agility of newer microservice architectures and application development platforms like Kubernetes but also align those capabilities with their existing middleware, databases, and processes.

Trying to meet this need can get very complicated, very quickly, especially if an enterprise has a mix of hybrid cloud environments with applications that are both VM-based and containerized, running on public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises. For example, configuring and managing Kubernetes across hybrid cloud environments often requires multiple tools and a great deal of manual effort.

Application modernization doesn’t have to be this painful. We at Cisco are dedicated to simplifying this journey for our customers and those of our partners. I am excited to announce that Cisco and IBM Cloud are expanding our partnership to deliver a common and secure developer experience across on-premises and public cloud environments that is designed to help customers simplify the development, deployment, and management of modern applications.

Addressing the Needs of Application Modernization

The joint solution from Cisco and IBM Cloud will accelerate customers’ journeys to application modernization by enabling developers to quickly build, test, and deliver modern microservice applications across a hybrid cloud infrastructure.

As part of our expanded collaboration, we are announcing support for IBM Cloud Private on Cisco HyperFlex and HyperFlex Edge hyperconverged infrastructure. This includes support for IBM Cloud Pak for Applications. IBM Cloud Paks deliver enterprise-ready containerized software solutions that give you an open, faster, more secure way to move your core business applications to any cloud–public or private.

A Broader Framework

As IBM described in their recent blog, Cisco and IBM are also working together on a broader hybrid cloud architecture that will leverage expertise from both partners:

Cisco’s enterprise-class data center, networking, and analytics

IBM’s hybrid cloud solutions that include open source components such as containers, Kubernetes, Open Whisk, KNative, Istio, Cloud Foundry, and Prometheus, as well as an extensive catalog of IBM enterprise software and open source software, VMware services, virtual and bare metal servers

This architecture delivers a common and secure Kubernetes experience across on-premises (including edge) and public cloud environments. With IBM Multicloud Manager, customers have an enterprise-grade, management solution, purpose-built to address the visibility, governance, and automation challenges of multiple clusters. It can set and enforce polices for clusters and container-based applications running from on-premises to the edge.

With Cisco’s Virtual Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), customers can extend their network fabric from on-premises to the IBM Cloud. Through the IBM Services team, customers can implement Virtual ACI easily on their IBM Cloud. Virtual ACI is a software-only solution that you can deploy wherever you have at least two servers on which you can run the VMware ESXi hypervisor.

Customers can manage distributed infrastructure throughout its lifecycle with Cisco Intersight. This SaaS systems management platform can automate the deployment of HyperFlex hyperconverged infrastructure in the data center, remote locations, and at the edge. It provides proactive maintenance and support throughout the infrastructure lifecycle.

Delivering Consistency and Simplicity through Partnerships

Cisco is working with technology partners like IBM so our customers can modernize applications with consistency and simplicity in hybrid environments–bare metal, VMs, and containers–and across the core, cloud, and edge.

Stay tuned. There’s more to come.

Learn more

Read the blog from IBM Cloud.

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Visit the Cisco HyperFlex HCI website and see what customers are saying about HyperFlex.

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