Enda Cahill is one of our UK & Ireland Cisco Champions from Innovate Ltd. You can find out more about Enda here.
The transition to cloud is well underway. According to the Cisco Global Cloud Index 2013, 80% of all workloads will be in Cloud by 2018. Enterprises can leverage these cloud workloads through the Cisco Intercloud, a global network of connected clouds.
One of the core technology components in the Intercloud is Intercloud Fabric. As described by Cisco: “Intercloud Fabric is a software solution (no hardware involved) that helps customers to seamlessly augment their Private Cloud or Virtualised Data Center capacity to a Cloud Provider of choice, abstracting different aspects of the underlying infrastructure, while maintaining security and network configuration consistency.”
By providing a technology which allows workloads to move seamless between different cloud platforms, whether public or on premises, Intercloud Fabric enables typical cloud use cases such as:
- Enabling cloud workloads to be provided rapidly
- Bursting from private cloud to cloud provider for peak workloads
- Use cloud providers for backup and disaster recovery
- Deploy test and development infrastructure in the cloud
However, Intercloud Fabric adds additional value through automation and centralised management of multiple cloud providers. The programmable policy driven infrastructure ensures consistency and security of the workloads as they move between different providers. Intercloud Fabric also provides the ability to convert workloads between the formats used by different providers. These features combined unlock value in areas such as:
- Allowing assignment of workloads to the optimal cloud provider at a particular time
- Providing consistency in workloads deployed on cloud infrastructure
- Enabling cloud workloads to be provided securely and in line with IT policy to consumers within the organisation
- Ability to use a standard interface across all your cloud providers
- Ability to migrate workloads between cloud providers
The graphical view of the benefits of Cisco Intercloud Fabric is reproduced here from John McDonough’s presentation, BRKCLD-2003, at Cisco Live recently in San Diego.
There are two versions of Intercloud Fabric. Enterprises will use Intercloud Fabric for Business, which is deployed to allow an organisation to avail of the Intercloud. Service Providers will utilise Intercloud Fabric for Provider which allows Cloud Service Providers to provide services to the Intercloud ecosystem.
Provision of information technology infrastructure and services is changing dramatically, therefore the tools to manage, automate and orchestrate workloads across multiple cloud providers will become a transforming component in the IT landscape.
Further improvements to Intercloud Fabric were announced at Cisco Live earlier this month and supported platforms include VMware, Hyper-V, Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure among others. For those of you who are interested in understanding how you can benefit from Intercloud Fabric a product trial and additional details on the features and architecture are available on the product page at Intercloud Fabric.
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