Cisco and IBM offer a managed private-cloud service

Cisco and IBM have rolled out a pair of managed private-cloud services aimed at customers looking for the utility of a public cloud delivered on premises.

Cisco and IBM Services have partnered to offer a Managed Private Cloud-as-a-service powered by Cisco’s Unified Computing System and available in two varieties, one for VMware and one for RedHat OpenShift environments. Cisco’s UCS combines x86 servers with networking and storage access into a single packaged system.

IBM installs and manages the compute environment and delivers tools for support and enhancement requests. In addition, the offering places a high priority on security, proactive monitoring, and reporting. Cisco’s cloud-based Intersight system helps to manage the environment, according to a blog post about the services from Keith Dyer, a vice president in the Global Partner Organization at Cisco.

By combining Cisco’s data-center portfolio with IBM Services, the two companies deliver on- and off-premises private cloud in a way that reduces risk and complexity, and that can scale when needed, Dyer said. It involves minimal CAPEX, predictable billing, and no long-term commitments, he stated.

The  service stems from an existing Cisco-IBM partnership. Last year Cisco and IBM said the companies would meld their data-center and cloud technologies to help customers more easily and securely build and support on-premises and hybrid-cloud applications.

Cisco, IBM Cloud and IBM Global Technology Services (IBM’s professional services business) said they will work to develop a hybrid-cloud architecture that melds Cisco’s data-center, networking and analytics platforms with IBM’s cloud offerings.

IBM’s contribution includes heavy emphasis on Kubernetes-based offerings such as Cloud Foundry and Cloud Private as well as a catalog of IBM enterprise software such as Websphere and open-source software such as OpenWhisk, KNative, Istio and Prometheus.

At that time Cisco said customers deploying its Virtual Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) technologies could extend that network fabric from on-premises to the IBM Cloud.  ACI is Cisco’s software-defined networking (SDN) data-center package, but it also delivers the company’s Intent-Based Networking technology, which brings customers the ability to automatically implement network and policy changes on the fly and ensure data delivery.

What is intent-based networking?

In the future, the ability to deploy IBM Cloud Pak for Applications in a Cisco ACI environment will also be supported, Cisco stated. Other IBM prepackaged Cloud Paks include a secured Kubernetes container and containerized IBM middleware designed to let customers quickly  spin-up enterprise-ready containers, the company said.

Additionally IBM said it would add support for IBM Cloud Private, which manages Kubernetes and other containers on Cisco HyperFlex and HyperFlex Edge hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) systems. HyperFlex is Cisco’s HCI that offers computing, networking and storage resources in a single system. The package can be managed via Cisco’s Intersight software-as-a-service cloud-management platform that offers a central dashboard of HyperFlex operations.

IBM said it added Hyperflex support to its IBM Cloud Pak for Applications as well.