With Cisco's hybrid cloud Fabric, users can migrate workloads across different public and private clouds. But are enterprises really ready for a multi-cloud world?
Cloud users want the freedom to move their apps and data from one cloud to another. Cisco Systems, with its hybrid cloud strategy and new software for cloud-to-cloud portability, thinks it can help make that happen.
Cisco is now offering the production version of its hybrid cloud Fabric -- software that lets customers migrate workloads between different public, private and hybrid clouds -- in a move the networking titan says will continue to evolve its hybrid cloud strategy from vision to reality.
hybrid cloud Fabric, which in September became available to a select group of customers through Cisco's Early Customer Success Program, enables what Cisco calls "hypervisor-independent workload portability" across various public and private cloud platforms, including those from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
The rollout of hybrid cloud Fabric comes one year after San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco unveiled its vision for Intercloud, a global network of connected private and public clouds. That network consists of both Cisco's own data centers, and those of its service provider partners.
Cisco's hybrid cloud partners can use the hybrid cloud Fabric to create customer portals, through which users can broker their applications and workloads across the hybrid cloud ecosystem. And, with the market steadily progressing toward hybrid cloud, demand for this type of workload portability is expected to grow, said Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst of ZK Research, an analyst firm based in Westminster, Mass.
"Ultimately, what you want from cloud is the ability to move information between cloud providers, and I think that's something that, by and large, the industry needs to think about," Kerravala said.
That thought was top of mind for Cisco partner and cloud services provider Sungard Availability Services (AS) when it joined the hybrid cloud ecosystem nearly a year ago, said Jack Dziak, executive vice president, global products for Wayne, Penn.-based Sungard AS. The company noticed an uptick in customer demand for hybrid IT environments, where workloads and applications could be orchestrated across clouds, he said.
"A one-size-fits-all cloud, we feel strongly, doesn't fit the mold of the use cases we are seeing in the enterprise today," Dziak said.
The hybrid cloud ecosystem today consists of 60 service provider partners and 350 data centers around the globe, according to Rob Lloyd, Cisco's president of development and sales. Apart from providing scale, this global network of providers minimizes data sovereignty concerns by giving organizations more choice and control over where, geographically, their data is hosted, he added.
All 60 hybrid cloud partners, including Sungard AS, Deutsche Telekom, Logicalis and other service providers, will deploy Cisco's Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), a technology Lloyd pegged as another critical element to the overall hybrid cloud strategy.
"They are not all using ACI today," Lloyd said. "But they all have a committed roadmap to move to ACI as part of the differentiation that they will offer for those hybrid cloud workloads."
Underpinning hybrid cloud is the ACI policy model, which allows application policies, such as those for security, to remain intact as those applications move across the network and into different cloud environments, Lloyd said.
While hybrid cloud users can move workloads onto AWS and Azure through public APIs, the ACI policy model cannot be extended to these public cloud platforms, Lloyd added. The policy model, instead, can only be exported to the hybrid cloud partners deploying ACI.
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