Cisco is expanding its Internet of Everything (IoE) footprint with the announcement that it is partnering with 35 independent software vendors (ISVs) for its Cisco Intercloud cloud service offering. The new ISV partners will offer products concentrating on three areas: next-generation developer platforms, big data and analytics, and IoE cloud services.
The Intercloud is Cisco’s globally connected network of clouds offering secure cloud services anywhere in the world. Built on a globally distributed, highly secure cloud platform, the Intercloud is capable of meeting the demands of the IoE. It is designed specifically for high-value application workloads, with real-time analytics and 'near infinite' scalability. This open approach delivers global scale, with local presence which this allows local hosting and local provider options that enable data sovereignty.
Cisco plans to open the Intercloud Marketplace in fall of 2015 offering:
- Developer Platforms: Cisco is partnering with commercial companies including Apprenda, Active State and Docker to make their cloud developer environments a part of the Intercloud. It is also expanding its participation in open source developer communities like Cloud Foundry, OpenShift and Kubernetes.
- Big Data and Analytics: Cisco is partnering with providers of big data solutions including MapR, Hortonworks, Cloudera and the Apache Hadoop Community to provide a hybrid implementation of Enterprise Big Data solutions. Working with these partners, Cisco will securely connect and extend its on-premise Hadoop solutions with Cisco Intercloud Services, providing customers identical policy, control, security and resiliency across their big data implementations.
- Internet of Everything Cloud Services: Cisco will be exposing APIs for application developers that enables network control, performance and security to be delivered from the datacenter to the device. Cisco will also be delivering IoE services like Data Virtualization, Energywise and the Cisco Services Exchange Platform via the Intercloud. Utilizing an open model around developer APIs and micro-services, developers and enterprises will have the ability to integrate these capabilities into their own services and applications.
The list of ISVs participating include: ActiveState, Apprenda, Basho, Chef, Citrix, CliQr, Cloud Enabled, CloudBerry Lab, Cloudera, Cloudify, CloudLink, Couchbase, CTERA, Datadog, Davra Networks, desktopsites, Druva, Egnyte, ElasticBox, F5 Networks, Hortonworks, Informatica, MapR, MongoDB, Moonwalk, Nirmata, Panzura, Pegasystems, Platfora, Sanovi, ScaleArc, Skytree, StoAmigo, Talisen Technologies and Zenoss.
Cisco also announced its latest hybrid cloud software offerings to include new security capabilities, increased manageability across clouds and support for additional hypervisors through the Intercloud Fabric hybrid cloud platform. Cisco continues its Intercloud Fabric hybrid cloud deployment by expanding its 'Any VM, Any Cloud' philosophy in three areas: security, control and flexibility.
The Cisco Intercloud Fabric now extends its zone-based firewall services to support Microsoft Azure providing the ability to secure traffic between virtual machines without redirecting this traffic to the edge firewall for lookup by including a zone-based firewall, the Cisco Virtual Security Gateway (VSG). With VSG support in Cisco Intercloud Fabric, customers who use the VSG for the Cisco Nexus 1000V Series Switch in their enterprise data center can extend the same policies to the VSG instance in the public cloud. This provides the ability to have consistent firewall policies across the entire hybrid cloud infrastructure.
Cisco is also now extending its VM onboarding to support Amazon VPC allowing businesses to extend management to VMs already deployed in a public cloud by identifying pre-existing target VMs and moving them under Intercloud Facric control. Cisco Intercloud Fabric now supports VMware vSphere, OpenStack KVM, and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor deployments.