Checking in with Cisco’s Metacloud

Last year Cisco bought Metacloud to create an OpenStack Private Cloud division:

Like almost all technology vendors there, Cisco is looking to build its cloud story.A key part of this strategy last year was the acquisition of Metacloud, a company that specializes in offering private clouds based on OpenStack . I sat down with director Scott Sanchez Metacloud strategy recently to catch up on how you exercise.There is a big difference between Metacloud and many other private cloud offerings on the market: Cisco will handle your private cloud for you. The controller hardware - which is composed of a pair of Cisco UCS servers, a router ASR and Nexus 9000 switch - is located in the data center customers, but is managed remotely by Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud Team. In fact, Cisco centrally manages all Metacloud private clouds.

The idea is to give the public an experience like Amazon Web Services cloud, where the company manages all the necessary software for the cloud. But the hardware is in the customer premises. Beyond the controller hardware, customers can use their existing infrastructure for scalability of private cloud, or Cisco UCS can use additional servers or black-boxes. When developers need a virtual machine or additional storage, rotating upward from Metacloud. Cisco equipment is constantly releasing updates to the software in the cloud, which is based on OpenStack, add new features.

It's not a completely unique approach to the market: IBM recently bought OpenStack BlueBox provider that has a similar model that doubles as a private cloud service. Newcomer to the market Platform9 has a similar remote management private cloud offering. It is in stark comparison to a private cloud VMware offering, that provides management tools for customers to rotate and manage their own private clouds.

The ultimate goal is for Cisco to connect these Metaclouds with cloud offerings from Cisco Intercloud - the company's effort to build a series of connected public cloud offerings in the market. There integrations for customers to link Meta Cloud AWS or Microsoft Azure también.Esperar to see progress over Intercloud Meta Cloud and move forward - that seems to be an area of Cisco is committed to under the new leadership of CEO Chuck Robbins .