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?

We are introducing the Solution Accelerator Community Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud.  Anyone with a Cisco.com registration can access this site.

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.

We have placed our Multi-Cloud  solution accelerator on this site and we are extremely proud of our integration with Openstack (and Amazon AWS and VMware vCloud Director).

Tags: cloud, Cloud Computing, community, intelligent automaiton for cloud, intelligent automation, OpenStack, orchestration

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.

Tags: Cisco Open Network Environment, future, OpenFlow, OpenStack, SDN

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.

So now , let me help you a little bit more to thank you for being on this blog -- Why don’t you check the last blog of Rodrigo Flores about the announcement
Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud -- OpenStack support  (And AWS, vCloud, vCenter) -- I bet it can’t hurt .
Read More »

Tags: Cisco, cloud, data center, intelligent automation, OpenStack, Unified Data Center IQ

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!

Tags: libvirt, open source, Open vSwitch, OpenStack

So, with our announcements around OpenStack this week a few folks have asked me how OpenStack fits into our broader strategies like Cisco Open Network Environment. The short answer is “quite well, actually”, the longer answer follows.

If you look back our original introduction of the Cisco Open Network Environment, we made a couple of points—there is a plurality of use cases and as a result, there need to be a plurality of enabling technologies. While there are common objectives such as agility and programmability to better handle the macro trends like cloud and virtualization, the truth is, everyone has their own design objectives and priorities. To that sentiment, I might add that folks have varying operational objectives and priorities—the appetite for the amount of risk and complexity they want to take on.

With the three-pillar structure of the Open Network Environment, we feel like we have given folks the flexibility to choose the right technologies for the job. With initiatives like OpenStack we now support a different kind of flexibility.

While a segment of the market seems to want to start writing their own protocols and hand-wiring flow tables, a different segment of the market is moving in the other direction, expressing a desire to get out of the infrastructure business and focus their time and efforts on their apps and their users—this has traditionally been the Vblock and FlexPod crowd. With OpenStack, they now have another option—they get the programmability we talk about with the Open Network Environment, but at the stack level, instead of at the box level. The idea behind something like the Cisco Edition of OpenStack is simplify the task and reduce the risks of standing up a cloud stack. You have the full Folsom release of OpenStack, some Puppet recipes to simplify deployment and validation against the relevant Cisco hardware (follow that last link for details).

To get more insights into our OpenStack announcements this week, check our this blog by Lew Tucker, our VP/CTO for Cloud Computing and this post by Kyle Mestery, one of the many Cisco folks who has invested a great deal of time and effort in OpenStack.

One final thought. We are a long way from being done yet. In just the last few days, I blogged about how our Virtuata and vCider acquisitions fit into a multi-cloud strategy, we have had the aforementioned posts related to this week’s OpenStack announcements, and Rodrigo Flores just posted about our Multi-Cloud Acceleration Kits for our Intelligent Automation for Cloud solution. While cloud is the destination, there are many ways to get there as we have customers and we will continue to innovate and partner on a number of fronts and in a number of ways that will likely surprise some folks. Stay tuned.

Tags: Cisco Open Network Environment, Cloud Computing, FlexPod, OpenStack, programmability, SDN, Vblock, virtualization