The Gift of Managed Private Cloud

How’s your holiday shopping going? Finding everything on your list?

Sorry—shouldn’t have asked.

I know the answer. Any other time of year, you can skip out the door on a whim, head to the mall, and see what treasures you happen to run across. No pressure. No obligations. No fear. You pick up an item for yourself in one place, spot the perfect gift for your 9-year-old in another. It’s all harmonious and easy and good.

But holiday shopping is different. Suddenly lists are involved. And pressure. Because failure to deliver on the specific items in these lists will not be met with gracious understanding. In fact, it may very well be met with tears. You don’t want tears.

So you trudge out clutching your list and embark upon what will surely be an epic search for Hatchimals (gratitude is in order if you have no idea what those are), the new Nintendo set, the Nerf Remote Control Drone Blaster, or whatever it is that has been scrawled onto that very well thought-out list of desperately yearned-for items.

Sounds a lot to me like shopping for private cloud.

Your company leadership knows what they want (to save money and gain a competitive advantage), your developers know what they want (quick and easy access to compute resources), and you know what you want (for whatever you choose to succeed gloriously so you will continue to enjoy all the benefits of full-time employment).

So you’ve got your list. And if you’ve read the analyst reports, you know it’s going to be very difficult to make all the contributing authors to that list happy. Private cloud is challenging. And done incorrectly it can be a time-consuming, costly endeavor.

But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Make no mistake, private cloud is being done very well by some companies. And being leveraged very effectively by the customers of those companies.

So where do you shop? Which private cloud solution will check all the boxes on the list and have your constituents dancing merrily around the data center after it’s been deployed?

I suggest you look into Cisco Metacloud.

It’s a fully-managed, on-premises, OpenStack-based private cloud. We build it, we deploy it, and we remotely operate it 24×7 on your behalf. All you do is consume it. Just like public cloud.

It makes your company’s leadership happy because it delivers significant savings over the public cloud resources your team has probably been using; it makes developers happy because it does in fact provide fast, easy access to the resources they need to innovate; and it will make you happy because it is backed by a 99.99% uptime SLA (which is to say you can run production workloads on it without putting your job in jeopardy).

What kind of workloads are people running on Metacloud?

Some of our customers are running websites on it, some use it for test and dev, several use it for their big data analytics engines, and others are running their entire product stack, from the customer interface to the back-end databases on it. They work our product hard. They push it. And they continue to surprise us with the creative ways they are using it to revolutionize their businesses.

I could go on and on about what Metacloud can do and how your company will benefit from it, but that will make this blog post longer than anyone wants it to be.

So if you’re itching to cross “private cloud” off your list and you’re at all curious about Metacloud, I encourage you to pop over to our website and spend a few minutes learning more about it. You can keep it high-level and stick to videos and case studies, or you can dig deep into product functionality with our webinars and technical tutorials. Or, if you’d like to cut straight to the chase and have someone answer your very specific questions directly, just email me at aamagasu@cisco.com. I’ll be happy to put you in touch with one of our systems engineers or salespeople so they can talk through your challenges and help you figure out if Metacloud is right for you.

Happy Holidays, and good luck with the shopping.