Cisco boosts cloud software, lines up ISVs to write Internet of Everything services
Cisco added security, management and support for more hypervisors to its Intercloud Fabric software, an application that connects private, public and hybrid clouds together for workload mobility. Cisco also enlisted 35 software developers including Citrix, F5, Cloudera, Hortonworks and Chef -- to build services for the Intercloud and offer them through an Intercloud Marketplace.
Areas ISVs will target include development platforms for production applications, containers and community-based open source programs; big data and analytics; and IoE cloud services, such as network control, performance, security, data virtualization, energy management, and business services like collaboration and consistent portals from Cisco's Services Exchange Platform.
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Cisco has invested upwards of $2 billion into the Intercloud, a foundational underpinning of its Internet of Everything connected device strategy. Cisco believes 50 billion devices will be connected by 2020, creating an Internet of human-to-human, human-to-machine and machine-to-machine interaction.
Cisco says it has 100 customers and 30 partners for its Intercloud Fabric software. Seven partners -- Cirrity, iLand, Peak 10, Presidio, QTS, Quest, Sungard Availability Services announced new hybrid cloud services built on Intercloud Fabric this week at the Cisco Live conference. And Cisco says customers such as Macmillan Publishing and The Salvation Army are the software to instill a single operational model across production, develop and test, and quality assurance environments.
The latest release of Intercloud Fabric includes security enhancements such as Cisco's Virtual Security Gateway zone-based firewall. VSG is designed to secure traffic between virtual machines without re-directing that traffic to an edge firewall for lookup. Within Intercloud Fabric, it means that customers who use VSG in Cisco's Nexus 1000v virtual switch in the data center can extend the same firewall policies to the public cloud, such as Microsoft Azure.
Management enhancements to Intercloud Fabric include extension of VM onboarding to Amazon's virtual private cloud. This allows businesses to extend Intercloud Fabric management to target VMs already in the Amazon public cloud.
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Additional hypervisor support now extends to OpenStack KVM and Microsoft Hyper-V. This is in addition to existing support for VMware vSphere.
In addition to Citrix, F5, Cloudera, Chef and Hortonworks, ISVs writing to the Intercloud include ActiveState, Apprendra, Basho, Cliqr, Cloud Enabled, Cloudberry Lab, Cloudify, Cloudlink, Couchbase, ctera, Datadog, Davra Networks, desktopsites Inc, Druva, Egnyte, Elasticbox, Informatica, MapR, MongoDB, Moonwalk, Nirmata, Panzura, Pega, Platfora, ScaleArc, SkyTree, Stoamigo Talisen and Zenoss.