Cisco pulls Cloud together

Cisco has launched a unified cloud service called Cisco CloudVerse, a framework that combines the Unified Data Center, Cloud Intelligent Network, and Cloud Applications ‚ needed to enable organisations to build, manage and connect public, private and hybrid clouds.

Cisco says that CloudVerse allows businesses to realise all of the benefits of clouds: improved agility, better economics, enhanced security and a dynamic, assured experience.

The inaugural Cisco Global Cloud Index (2010 ‚ 2015), forecasts how dramatically clouds are changing business IT and consumer services. The study predicts that over 50 percent of computing workloads in data centers will be cloud-based by 2014, and that global cloud traffic will grow over 12 times by 2015, to 1.6 Zettabytes/year ‚ the equivalent of over four days of business class video for every person on earth to:

Cloud is the fastest growing component of data center traffic, which itself will grow 4-fold at a 33 percent CAGR to reach 4.8 zettabytes annually by 2015. Cloud is also estimated today to be 11 percent of data center traffic, growing to more than 33 percent of the total by 2015. Cloud is becoming a critical element for the future of information technology (IT) and delivery of video and content. The vast majority of the data center traffic is not caused by end users but by the data centers and clouds themselves undertaking activities that are largely transparent to end users ‚ like backup and replication. By 2015, 76 percent of data center traffic will remain within the data center itself as workloads migrate between various virtual machines and background tasks take place, 17 percent of the total traffic leaves the data center to be delivered to the end user, while an additional 7 percent of total traffic is generated between data centers through activities such as cloud-bursting, data replication and updates.

The study suggests that the predicted explosive growth in cloud and data center traffic will create the need for advanced capabilities that allow the data center and network to work together to support end-to-end cloud application and service delivery. Cloud traffic is dynamic, and advanced network intelligence and management capabilities will likely become essential to help enable compute, network and storage resources to be provisioned on-demand.

Today, most cloud technologies exist in silos, preventing an efficient, integrated management approach. By integrating the three foundational cloud elements ‚ the Cisco Unified Data Center with the Cisco Intelligent Network to enable Cloud Applications ‚ CloudVerse delivers a business-class cloud experience: within the cloud: between clouds: and beyond the cloud to the end user. Today over 70% of leading Cloud providers are using Cisco CloudVerse on their journey to the cloud.

Cisco is supporting CloudVerse with new cloud enablement services, which combine Cisco’s professional services expertise with that of a broad ecosystem of partners, allowing organisations to accelerate their cloud success and realize the full potential of cloud computing.

‚Until now, cloud technology resided in silos, making it harder to build and manage clouds, and to interconnect multiple clouds, posing critical challenges for many organisations,‚ says Rory Green, Data Centre product specialist at Cisco South Africa. ‚Cisco uniquely enables the world of many clouds ‚ connecting people, communities and organisations with an assured cloud user experience for the next-generation Internet. We are very pleased that many of the world’s leading businesses and service providers are adopting Cisco CloudVerse as the foundation of their cloud strategies, and we look forward to partnering closely with each of them on their journey to a world of many clouds.‚

Cisco CloudVerse offers a compelling economic advantage ‚ helping organisations offer business IT-as-a-service and dynamic SMB/consumer services. Moving from a traditional virtualised data center to a CloudVerse cloud can reduce IT total cost of ownership (TCO ‚ opex and capex) by up to 50 percent and reduce the time to offer new cloud services from weeks to minutes.

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