UCS Important for Building the Cloud: Cisco

Unified Computing Systems (UCS) are one of Cisco’s (News - Alert) foundations for building the cloud, according to company statements and recent news reports.

In addition, UCS is a noteworthy blade-based platform for businesses, which “tightly integrates server and networking functions,” the company said. There were 7,400 UCS customers as of August. As UCS becomes more prominent, the cloud can provide lower costs, more agility and better security – just some of the many benefits of the cloud for users.

“…We're really focused on … enabling people to build public clouds,” Lew Tucker, Cisco's CTO of Cloud computing, told Network World. “While there are many different clouds out there, there is an underlying cloud model that we all adhere to. We want the cloud infrastructure to have a pool of server, networking and storage resources that we virtualize and turn into a service for applications to take advantage of.”

Also, Cisco has partnered with EMC, VMware and Intel (News - Alert) in a joint venture, the “Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) Company,” which speeds the time to market for cloud providers. And Cisco is involved with OpenStack, an open source cloud initiative. Cisco and 14 other vendors developed a “virtualized networking service called Quantum (News - Alert) to help developers write applications that can inherently take advantage of more interesting network topologies and embedded network services.”

In addition, Cisco has introduced CloudVerse, a framework that offers the pieces to build, manage and connect public, private and hybrid clouds, according to a company press release.

CloudVerse rests on the pillars of Unified Data Centers, Cloud Intelligent Networks and Cloud Applications and Services.

Just to get an idea of how widespread the cloud is becoming, a recent report from the Cisco Cloud Index projects that over 50 percent of computing workloads in data centers will be cloud-based by 2014, the company said. In addition, cloud traffic worldwide will increase over 12 times by 2015.

In 2015, 34 percent of data center traffic will be associated with cloud-based applications, while 66 percent will be associated with traditional data center applications, Cisco projected, according to TMCnet. Only 11 percent of data center traffic was cloud-based in 2010, TMCnet added. The increase in cloud use will result in the data center and network working “together to support end-to-end cloud application delivery,” the company added.

Several businesses, service providers and government offices will use CloudVerse as the foundation of their cloud strategies. In fact, over 70 percent of top cloud providers use CloudVerse.

In addition, new unified management capabilities are being added by Cisco, including Cisco Intelligent Automation for the Cloud and Cisco Network Services Manager. There is also a “Cloud-to-Cloud Connect” offering, and new features on the Hosted Collaboration Solution.

“Until now cloud technology resided in silos, making it harder to build and manage clouds, and to interconnect multiple clouds, posing critical challenges for many organizations,” Padmasree Warrior (News - Alert), Cisco’s senior vice president of Engineering and CTO, said in the statement. “Cisco uniquely enables the world of many clouds – connecting people, communities and organizations with a business-class cloud user experience for the next-generation Internet. We are very pleased that many of the world's leading businesses and service providers are adopting CloudVerse as the foundation of their cloud strategies, and we look forward to partnering closely with them on their journey to a world of many clouds.”