Cisco first got involved with the open-source OpenStack cloud platform in 2011 with the Bexar release and initially was focused mostly on networking. Over the last several years, Cisco’s OpenStack involvement and product portfolio have grown beyond just networking.
In a video interview with eWEEK, Lew Tucker, vice president and CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco, detailed his firm’s OpenStack platform efforts.
Tucker commented that Cisco has been expanding its OpenStack efforts a lot more outside of networking as the adoption of OpenStack within Cisco has grown. Cisco’s first OpenStack product was the OpenStack Cisco Edition, which was first released in October 2012. In 2013, Cisco announced accelerator packs for its UCS servers that were intended to accelerate adoption of OpenStack on Cisco server hardware. Those two efforts have now been rolled into Cisco’s broader OpenStack initiatives. Tucker explained that Cisco now has software partners, including Red Hat, to help enable go-to-market efforts for OpenStack on Cisco hardware.
Today, Cisco has three primary areas of focus for OpenStack. The company recently acquired OpenStack private cloud vendor Metacloud, which provides the ability for Cisco to now deliver OpenStack as a service onsite at a customer location.
“Metacloud can come in and deploy OpenStack on-premises, on the customer’s hardware and then operate it remotely,” Tucker said.
Another component of Cisco’s strategy is to build OpenStack solutions, which involves putting OpenStack on top of Cisco hardware for customers.
The final piece of the Cisco OpenStack cloud strategy is the global Intercloud initiative. With Intercloud, a global fabric of connected clouds is being organized together with Cisco partners.
“We very much think that just like the Internet became the Internet out a set of networks, that the next stage of cloud computing is really taking clouds, which are pretty much islands today, connecting them up and making an intercloud,” Tucker said.
Watch the full video interview with Lew Tucker below:
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.