Over the past year, Cisco has been increasingly vocal and active around open source solutions .
One of my favorite blogger, Omar Sultan , spent a lot of time writing on the subject , starting with OpenStack (ie blog :OpenStack cisco ONE and you) - You may want to check all his blogs here
Cisco also has a blog dedicated to this topic “Open at Cisco”
Last June Cisco Shashi Kiran announced the Cisco ONE(Open Networking Environment) on Cisco blog, and last week at Gartner DC , both David Yen , SVP & GM Data Center Group , and John Manville SVP Cisco IT Global Infrastructure talk about what Cisco ONE means in terms of solutions and IT platform for us and our customers .
Lew Tucker ,Cisco VP , Chief Technology Officer for Cloud Computing and Vice Chairman OpenStack foundation is obviously one of the force behind the evolution of the data center . Actually Lew was recently recognized as one of the top ten pioneers in the cloud computing emergence by InformationWeek .
Watch Lew Tucker talking about innovation and open source in this short video
On December 11 webcast , Shashi Kiran will moderate a conversation between Lew Tucker and Raj Patel
Lew Tucker, Chief Technology Officer of Cloud Computing at Cisco, will provide an overview of OpenStack, its origins, benefits, and why Cisco is involved in this community effort.
Raj Patel, Vice President, Cloud Services at Cisco, will discuss the strategic decision—and results to date—of choosing OpenStack as the cloud platform for Cisco WebEx, the market-leading Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) collaboration solutions.
Topics to be covered include:
An introduction to OpenStack, and highlights of the latest release of OpenStack (Folsom), including self-service provisioning in multi-tenant networks
The role of open network programmability in achieving the full potential of the cloud
The benefits that customers can expect from OpenStack as part of their cloud initiatives
How WebEx architects significantly accelerated new product releases with OpenStack, and improved both operational efficiency and infrastructure resiliency
The status of OpenStack standardization and the growing OpenStack development community
How OpenStack relates to Cisco’s Open Network Environment (or Cisco ONE), the OpenStack Quantum project, Software-Defined Networking (SDN), and OpenFlow
How Cisco is enabling customers to take an evolutionary approach to OpenStack
To register now for this unique webcast click here
We are excited by the demand for Cisco’s Intelligent Automation for Cloud Starter Edition designed for pilot cloud deployments. Just Recently we announced the new version of our stack, Intelligent Automation for Cloud (IAC) 3.1. The release of Cisco IAC 3.1 continues to demonstrate Cisco’s commitment to enterprise customers and service providers to successfully deploy and manage their private, public or hybrid cloud environments.
There are so many opportunities to build private, public, and hybrid clouds with our Cloud Portal, Process Orchestrator, Server Provisioner and Network Services Manager. Over a year ago we embarked on a journey to build cloud behaviors into our product through a concept we call Accelerator Packs which are XML files containing the service catalog, data model and orchestration workflows that snap into Cisco IAC Starter Edition or Cisco IAC 3.1. Accelerator packs extend Cisco IAC’s ability to manage multiple cloud environments such as Openstack, Amazon EC2 and VMware vCloud Director. Accelerator packs were designed to meet the needs of our differing customers: large service providers, or enterprises acting as a service provider, that desire completely custom behaviors, and other customers that are looking for pre-built and Cisco supported cloud-in-a-box solution.
Our platform is like the iPOD. When installed and turned on you have a blank slate, no music ships with that iPOD. Our automation packs are like the music and video files that upload and then your iPOD comes alive. With our 3.0 Starter Edition and the 3.1 release, we have productized many playlists for a starter and enterprise grade cloud. This means more than 70 pre-built portal services and over 150 orchestration workflows. But wait, there is one more thing: Cisco Advanced Services, Cisco partners and customers can build their specific content to extend the productized behaviors and content. It can be transportable from one instance of Intelligent Automation for Cloud to another for leverage and integration.
How do we encourage sharing between all the 100’s of folks building content for this platform?
This will be the place for Cisco, Partners and Customers to post, download, improve, upload content for sharing within the community. This content can only run on the Intelligent Automation for Cloud software, so if you would like purchase a version of the platform for non-production test and development use, please go here. While the solution accelerators are NOT open source, the use of this site is governed by these terms of use.
True Story: When my son was about 3, I took him to go see his first movie in an actual movie theater. They had just built a brand new theater near our home and he was suitably impressed with all the bright shiny lights. Anyway, we got our popcorn and grabbed our seats just as the lights were dimming (you never really go anywhere quickly when an inquisitive toddler is involved). We got through the movie trailers, then, to my surprise, my son popped out of his seat and said he was ready to go home. Being his first movie-going experience, he thought the trailers were the big deal and did not realize we had not yet gotten to the featured attraction.
I was reminded of this after watching some conversations around SDN and programmability unfold over the last few days. If you believe to some of the folks out there, SDN is a settled matter--the technology is done, use cases nailed, and winning vendors already crowned. All that’s left is for the janitors to sweep the popcorn off the floor.
In case you are still in denial, we entered the 3rd week of our 6 weeks long Unified Data Center IQ Challenge . Since Sunday midnight PST , you can find on www.Facebook.com/ciscodc , a new set of questions , focused this week on Cisco Intelligent Automation and OpenStack .
Don’t tell me that you can’t answer at least one question ! Remember that only one correct answer makes you eligible to participate to the raffle for the iPAD.
With the recent news about the Cisco Edition of OpenStack, I wanted to take some time to write about the contributions Cisco has done in the OpenStack community. Cisco’s engineers have been active in many areas of OpenStack. Below is a sample of some of the work being done by engineers at Cisco.
Cisco has been an active participant in the Quantum community since it’s creation. Cisco presented one of the original four blueprints which lead to the creation of Quantum at the Diablo Summit. The communities continued efforts have helped to ensure Quantum’s inclusion as a core project in the OpenStack Folsom release, and Cisco has been a key part of this work. The work Cisco has done here includes having multiple engineers on the Quantum core team doing code reviews, feature work, and bug fixes.
Work on integrating Quantum into Horizon was initially done by engineers from Cisco. This work has led to an increased effort to expose Quantum functionality into Horizon.
Cisco has contributed code and leadership around unit testing and integration. This is an increasingly important area to focus on. A project as large and distributed as OpenStack benefits highly from this type of infrastructure work.
Cisco has had engineers working on Nova in various capacities, with a focus on Quantum integration issues and bug fixes.
In addition to these OpenStack projects, Cisco has also contributed code around some Open Source projects which OpenStack makes use of.
Cisco worked with Nicira engineers to integrate support for Open vSwitch into libvirt. Cisco has continued to support and enhance this work going forward.
Cisco has contributed bug fixes, code reviews, and some feature work on Open vSwitch.
Cisco expects to continue and increase its involvement in both OpenStack and other Open Source projects. We look forward to collaborating with you in these vibrant communities going forward!
Don’t tell me that you can’t answer at least one question ! Remember that only one correct answer makes you eligible to participate to the raffle for the iPAD.