Today we are announcing Cisco CloudVerse, an integrated set of capabilities that enables customers to deliver cloud applications and services by uniquely combining the unified data center and cloud intelligent network. CloudVerse is the culmination of Cisco’s data center and network innovation over the last few years and provides our customer with the platform for their journey to the cloud. CloudVerse enables our customers to deliver cloud applications and services with a cloud platform tailored to their needs – whether private, public, or hybrid – in an interconnected world of many clouds.
CloudVerse enables service providers, governments, and enterprises to offer their solutions as a service and deliver them with the full benefits of clouds. CloudVerse’s benefits are greater simplicity in deployment and management of cloud services, stronger security with a more comprehensive approach, faster service agility, improved economics, and an assured experience for cloud users.
CloudVerse integrates the three key elements of a business-class cloud:
Unified Data Center – Bringing together the compute, network, management, and storage elements to offer an integrated platform for applications and services
Cloud Applications and Services – Cisco offers a set of pre-tested applications and services for those companies looking to build and provide cloud services to individuals, businesses, and their own organizations
Let’s dive a bit deeper into what these CloudVerse pillars are comprised of.
No matter which hemisphere you’re in, the season is beginning to change and the new season reminds me of a few changes and constants. Here in the San Francisco Bay area, the weather will soon be getting colder, the trees on the local hills will turn their leaves a different color, and traffic congestion picks up as local workers return from their vacations. But these changes are not out of the ordinary and we’re used to dealing with them. A little preparation, knowledge, and flexibility–whether dressing appropriately, admiring the beautiful seasonal transitions, and shifting a commute schedule–keep us going and happy.
Likewise, major changes in the cloud and data center are upon us, but we’ve seen transitions like this before in IT. Proper training, strong partnering, and accepting that progress is inevitable will position you for success on the pathway to Cloud delivery.
An example of one of our customers moving to the Cloud is Entel. Based in Chile, Entel has worked to integrate the power of data center computing with the intelligence of the network in a Unified Service Delivery approach. Here is a short video our global team put together with Entel.
It’s exciting to see customers using Cisco UCS servers and Nexus data center switching to deliver cloud services flexibly, at scale, and with a pay-per-use model and meeting with good success. In its portfolio of services, Entel can offer virtualization as well as Cloud services to their customers based upon specific needs. By combining the network and compute, Entel has what could be considered the most advanced data center in Chile. Their ability to offer any service with high availability quickly to the market puts them in a spot of opportunity and if that sounds good to you, please leave a comment on this blog.
Join Cisco for a technical seminar on planning for IPv6 transition. Along with Cisco technical experts and other customers, you will get an in-depth look at planning and technical considerations based on Cisco’s Preserve, Prepare and Prosper strategy. These workshops can accommodate between 40 and 50 people and will begin the week of May 23rd, 2011 and run through June 28th, 2011.
The topics of these technical sessions are as follows:
Cisco Locator/ID Separation Protocol (LISP) is routing architecture that provides new semantics for IP addressing. The current IP routing and addressing architecture uses a single numbering space, the IP address, to express two pieces of information:
Device identity
The way the device attaches to the network
The LISP routing architecture design separates the device identity, or endpoint identifier (EID), from its location, or routing locator (RLOC), into two different numbering spaces. Splitting EID and RLOC functions yields several advantages.
Check out this video for a quick review of LISP.
Although LISP was designed to deal with the route scalability problem in the Internet, it turns out is has the capability to help with the transition to IP Version 6 (IPv6), the next-generation Internet protocol.
The transition to IPv6 is an immediate challenge facing Public Sector, and specifically Federal customers today due to Government mandates and impending IPv4 address exhaustion for consumers of Government services.
Because IPv6 is not backward compatible with IPv4, and because its deployment and operation are different from that of IPv4, development and implementation of an IPv6 transition strategy is imperative. Many techniques exist to ease the transition to IPv6, and the network-based IPv6 transition techniques can be divided generally into three categories: dual-stack IPv4 and IPv6, IPv6 tunneling, and IPv6 translation.
Each approach has its features, benefits, and limitations; they are not all equivalent in terms of cost, complexity, or capabilities. Most likely, a combination of these techniques will provide the best solution. The role that the Locator/ID Separation Protocol (LISP) being developed by Cisco and the IETF can play in IPv6 transition strategies is documented in this Whitepaper.
Incorporating LISP into an IPv6 transition strategy can simplify the initial rollout of IPv6 by taking advantage of the LISP mechanisms to encapsulate IPv6 host packets within IPv4 headers (or IPv4 host packets within IPv6 headers). For example, you can build IPv6 islands and connect them with existing IPv4 Internet connectivity.
LISP is a Cisco innovation that is being promoted as an open standard. Cisco participates in standards bodies such as the IETF LISP Working Group to develop the LISP architecture.
