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Cisco's cloud strategy continued to gel Tuesday with the launch of a cloud framework, called CloudVerse, a triple-threat ecosystem that Cisco said combines Cisco's Unified Data Center, Cloud Intelligent Network and Cloud Applications to arm partners to offer Cisco-based cloud environments.
Along with the new framework and the new CloudVerse name, Cisco also added a host of new features to CloudVerse, products and services the San Jose, Calif.-based company said will help partners build, manage and connect clouds of various flavors, whether public, private or hybrid.
Cisco's official cloud framework comes on the heels of a Cisco study, dubbed the Cisco Cloud Index, that found that cloud traffic will increase 12 times by 2015 reaching a colossal 1.6 Zettabytes. The study also predicts that more than half of data center workloads will be cloud-based by 2014.
"It's no secret at this point that the cloud is emerging as not just a neat idea, but as a dominant force," Cisco Vice President of Worldwide Channels Ralph Nimergood said. The cloud is being fueled by users accessing data via multiple devices and the big data deluge impacting businesses. To accommodate this growth, Cisco foresees what Nimergood called a "world of many clouds," meaning there isn't a single type of cloud that will be the end all be all.
Nimergood said with CloudVerse Cisco is looking to tear down the silos of different clouds and offer integrated management across clouds by tying together three foundational elements of the cloud. Nimergood said with CloudVerse the Cisco Unified Data Center integrates with the Cisco Intelligent Network to enable Cloud Applications.
And CloudVerse delivers cloud computing within the cloud, between clouds and beyond the cloud to the end user. And partners, Nimergood said, will deliver CloudVerse to customers. Currently, more than 70 percent of cloud providers are using CloudVerse in some form.
The Unified Data Center component offers a fabric-based platform to automate an "as-a-service" model across physical and virtual environments. With CloudVerse, Cisco adds new unified management capabilities including Cisco Intelligent Automation for the Cloud, which offers automated provisioning and management of data center resources for IT asset delivery between data centers; and Cisco Network Services Manager, which creates, deploys and modifies networking resources on-demand in physical and virtual environments, said Cisco Director of Product Development Eric Schoch.
The Cloud Intelligent Network drives to offer a consistent cloud experience across multiple clouds. On Tuesday, Cisco launched Cloud-to-Cloud Connect, a new feature in the Cisco's ASR 1000 and ASR 9000 Series Aggregation Services Routers that enable resources to move between ASRs for resource orchestration between data centers and clouds, Schoch said.
And for Cloud Applications and Services, which enable "as-a-service" delivery of Cisco and third party cloud applications, Cisco added a new capabilities to its Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) including Private Cloud HCS, which lets business and partners build collaboration clouds using Cisco's designs and management capabilities; Mobile HCS, which lets partners and users connect mobile users; and Customer Collaboration, which adds contact center capabilities.
So far, Cisco has 22 partners signed on for HCS, six of which are in the market now and seven more that are readying their launch, Schoch said.
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