Delivering the open hybrid cloud with Cisco

4 septembre 2014Bryan Che

A shared vision of IT

At Red Hat, we believe deeply that the future of IT is the open hybrid cloud. As enterprises strive towards seizing new opportunities and satiating new customers in our rapidly evolving world, they need to adopt clouds that give a comprehensive set of capabilities, with increased IT efficiency, developer productivity, and business agility all coming together. And, they need to do this with an open and coherent cloud across a diverse, heterogeneous, and hybrid set of resources and technology providers. Otherwise, all the promised benefits of clouds will diffuse away amongst the challenges of brokering and managing so many discrete technology silos.

Earlier this year, we participated in Cisco ’s launch of Intercloud Fabric because they share our belief that clouds must be open and hybrid. Today, we are excited to build upon that foundation with a significantly expanded collaboration that joins the leading vendor in cloud infrastructure with the leading vendor in open source to develop and deliver the world’s most comprehensive, open hybrid cloud solutions.

Increased IT efficiency

One of the biggest reasons enterprises are building private clouds is to increase the efficiency of their IT. Today, most enterprises have long lead-times for introducing new services, and an inefficient IT is often the biggest culprit. Consider that when a business requests a new service or application, just to acquire, provision, and configure the supporting infrastructure is often a weeks--if not months--long process. Even virtualization hasn’t solved this problem; instead, it has introduced managing VM sprawl as yet another problem IT needs to solve.

This is why OpenStack and the move to IaaS is so compelling. Instead of having to acquire and provision infrastructure manually, your infrastructure can be software-defined and completely automated. Rather than constraining requests through a bottlenecked IT process, your users can request offerings via self-service. And, your IT infrastructure can readily scale up or down, offering tremendous efficiency and improved response times.

If the destination of OpenStack is compelling, though, the path there can be complex and hard. This is where Red Hat and Cisco’s collaboration can bring significant value to enterprises. We have created standardized, validated, and integrated solutions across our portfolios that can reduce deployment times by up to 90%. This means that you can quickly go from acquiring a complete hardware/software cloud stack to deploying and running it in production with Cisco and Red Hat, returning greater value and agility.

This integration and certification goes deep between Red Hat and includes Cisco’s UCS Integrated Infrastructure, Cisco Application centric Infrastructure (ACI) and joint collaboration around Intercloud solutions, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and associated add-ons such as Ceph storage, and even higher-level services such as Red Hat CloudForms, OpenShift, and Cisco Prime Service Catalog. In fact, Cisco’s certifications on Red Hat’s OpenStack and cloud platforms exceed that of any other partner. So, as enterprises expand their usage and needs around cloud, Cisco and Red Hat will have solutions to support them.

Faster business innovation

It’s not enough just to increase your IT efficiency with cloud--you need to turn that increased efficiency into faster business innovation. Businesses today require agility to respond to customers and market demands with immediacy and insight. How do you engage with customers on social media? How can you offer new services and features rapidly enough? How quickly can you react and change course in the midst of your busy seasons? Connecting and running your businesses in the cloud is essential to meeting these requirements.

Red Hat and Cisco’s collaboration goes beyond just certifying hardware/software stacks for the cloud. It also supports important business requirements. For example, as you deploy a new OpenStack-based cloud, how do you transition your existing business-critical applications and environments without having to do a complete replacement or creating a totally separate silo? Our joint reference architectures, technologies, and methodologies can help you in that transition.

Or, once you have a cloud in place, how do you create new applications to take advantage of it and improve your customers’ experience? With our joint application development and deployment capabilities powered by OpenShift by Red Hat, we can help you write and deliver these new applications with far improved time-to-market.

And, once your applications are running in the cloud, how do you gain business intelligence and improve your business responsiveness? Again, joint solutions--this time based upon Red Hat CloudForms--can provide what you need to take your business to the cloud.

Unmatched choice

As compelling as our integrated solutions are, both Red Hat and Cisco know that enterprises are going to deploy them in the broader context of other vendor solutions and technologies across heterogeneous, hybrid environments. That is why we work not only to certify our solutions together but also to offer unmatched choice to customers across an open hybrid cloud.

First, with the world’s largest open source and channel ecosystem with over 20,000 solution and delivery partners globally, enterprises have no shortage of options for how to acquire and implement a Red Hat/Cisco solution into their IT environment. You can choose how to bring a just-right solution into your business.

Second, we offer choice of technologies you can use beyond just those from Red Hat and Cisco. For example, even though we believe that Red Hat’s KVM-powered hypervisor and Red Hat and Cisco’s management tools offer industry-leading benefits, we also give customers the choice of deploying alternative technologies as they build and manage their OpenStack-based clouds. This avoids vendor lock-in.

Finally, Red Hat and Cisco can bridge multiple providers into an open and interoperable cloud spanning private, public, and hybrid topologies. Cisco’s overall Intercloud strategy, Cisco Intercloud Fabric and Red Hat’s certified platforms and tools across these different providers mean that enterprises can bring the power of the cloud across their entire environment.