LightEdge was recently included as the single service provider exclusively featured in a video presentation during the Cloud keynote address at Cisco Live Milan. Hear from our VP of Cloud and Product Architecture, Mike McHenry, who was interviewed for the video on the innovative things that Cisco is developing to drive the industry into the future below.
I recently had the opportunity to share some of my excitement about the Cisco UCS family of products during an interview with Cisco. Clips from this interview were recently played at the CiscoLive event in Milan and are available HERE There are so many exciting and innovative things that Cisco is developing in the Cloud space that I find it difficult to limit myself to a manageable quantity of talking points! That being said, over the next few weeks I plan to share three specific platforms that I believe will help propel LightEdge (and the industry at large) into the future. The first platform that I will discuss is Cisco UCSD.
Cisco UCSD (Cisco Unified Computing Systems Director)
UCS Director continues to be a foundation for the ever-increasing complexities of Cloud technologies. The compute, storage and networking components tend to get much of the attention when building Cloud platforms but I believe the provisioning and orchestration aspects of these environments are becoming even more critical than the underlying infrastructure itself. Investing in mission critical infrastructure (UCS hardware vs whitebox) is still a very important aspect of the design; but the best designed Cloud platforms tend to go unused if the consumers cannot easily CONSUME them. In other words you can build the best mouse trap the world has ever seen but it’s not going to fly off the shelves until you have developed an effective “sales channel”. I’m using the phrase “sales channel” loosely here, but I believe it really describes what is happening with IT. IT provides solutions, but if they are unable to do so in a scalable, reliable and timely fashion the consumers will find another store to shop at.
UCS Director solves this with out-of-the-box “sales channels”. In other words Cisco has pre-packaged “sales channels” for getting compute into the hands of the CONSUMERS of the compute (business users). It can also be customized around the Service Providers approach. From VM provisioning to Bare Metal, from Public Cloud to Private Cloud, from vSphere to HyperV, from traditional Windows application hosting to Big Data,from EMC to NetApp storage, the list goes on and on. UCSD helps tie these underlying “supply logistics” issues together while providing a consistent and scalable consumption engine for end users to consume IT services from. IT can do their job by keeping the shelves in the “cloud” stocked, and business users can pull inventory off the shelves as needed!
Finally consider that UCSD is not just a Service Provider tool. Business IT groups are struggling with the same challenges listed above, and UCS Director is a capable tool that can help Businesses solve their “sales channel” challenges as well as it helps Service Providers! This is a very important point. UCSD is not just another provisioning or automation tool!
Be sure to check back next week for highlights on Cisco VACs (Cisco Virtual Application Container Services).
