Enter Cisco’s InterCloud, Where Cisco Partnering with EMC Provides Choice

Today Cisco announced Cisco InterCloud as a means through which customers can lower total cost of ownership while and paving the way for interoperable and highly secure public, private and hybrid clouds. As longstanding strategic partners, EMC is working closely with Cisco on unique and innovative ways to combine InterCloud and EMC technologies for data management between public and private clouds.

Cloud computing promises many things. One of the most appealing benefits to the business is Choice. The ability to decide what is best for your environment and workload. The Choice that enables businesses to place workloads in private or public cloud, on-prem or off-prem based on specific requirements of that particular workload. This choice gives IT the flexibility to be in control and avoid vendor lock-in.

EMC continues to deliver choice for customers with its best-of-breed storage portfolio as well as choice in terms of where to deploy different workloads. Accelerating deployment of private clouds and public clouds are EMC’s offerings in Integrated Infrastructure – VCE Vblock truly converged infrastructure and VSPEX proven infrastructure. Both are leaders in their respective categories as evidenced by the recent Gartner Research report. EMC has built a robust service provider program with over 100 SP partners delivering over 450 services to provide additional choice to customers.

Building on our shared vision of enabling mobility and choice, EMC fully embraces Cisco’s InterCloud platform as a technology to enable workload mobility and to ensure that customers get the optimal IT and business value from their cloud providers (internal and public). Announced today, InterCloud is designed to be a highly secure hybrid cloud solution that allows applications to run in a public cloud as if they were on a customer’s private enterprise network. This announcement is a logical extension of Cisco and EMC’s shared leadership in converged infrastructure and deploying cloud environments for our customers. InterCloud is hypervisor-agnostic (a.k.a. choice) and also supports bare-metal applications (a.k.a. choice), offering the flexibility so crucial to today’s cloud infrastructure decisions.

You may already be familiar with the EMC VPLEX solution, the industry’s first and only true active-active data virtualization solution. VPLEX technology allows customers to stretch clusters, like VMware ESXi and Oracle RAC, across data centers.  InterCloud stretches the enterprise network to a cloud provider and VPLEX technology provides active-active data access over distance. You can begin to see where the possibilities for cloud mobility are headed. Watch this space for more in the coming weeks.

What else is possible? Think EMC RecoverPoint, which provides traditional disaster protection and an interesting “any point in time” recovery option. It’s just like rewind on your DVR. What if you could run RecoverPoint software in a cloud provider for simple, low-cost DR?

Where is all this going?  If you’ve been doing virtualization for a while, you know that networking is the hard part. Cisco’s InterCloud makes that part easier. EMC is doing our part on cloud-ready storage solutions that are easy to deploy. Stay tuned to see how it will all work together, enabling easier movement of workloads between private and public clouds.

About the Author: Brent Sloane