Clouds come in various flavors, but a common scenario is IT shops who have many applications on-premises (private clouds) and other workloads off-premise (public clouds).  This combination of private and public clouds is often called a hybrid cloud.  Integrating, customizing and securely delivering services based on hundreds of applications from dozens of vendors in public and private clouds are becoming part of a new wave of IT.  In addition, moving workloads between clouds is becoming a bigger part of IT every day.

Earlier this week, EMC unveiled its Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Solution that addresses this hybrid scenario.   The EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Solution is a fully engineered solution that integrates hardware, software and services from EMC to unite the strengths of private and public cloud.  The EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Solution allows choice among hypervisors and public clouds providers.  The solution can be built on VCE Vblocks or VSPEX solution portfolio.

Both VCE Vblocks and EMC VSPEX with Cisco technology build on vital technology building blocks of Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure.    Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure consists of the following, cloud-friendly technologies:

• A standard, highly-secure, automated infrastructure based on
  • Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) servers
  • Cisco Nexus datacenter switches
  • Cisco UCS Director  and UCS Manager management software
  • Additional capabilities for Application Centric Infrastructure, InterCloud Fabric, and Cisco security.

Why is UCS Integrated Infrastructure a building block cornerstone cloud technology?  The answer lies in the flexibility that UCS Integrated Infrastructure delivers.

Workloads move quickly between clouds and the underlying server and networking infrastructure must adapt to these movements.  Traditional servers are slow to adapt to these changes as their deployment times are measured in days or hours-in extreme cases, weeks.  However, UCS Integrated Infrastructure addresses this issue by abstracting all hardware in software.  Since the UCS Integrated Infrastructure cloud hardware is now all abstracted in software, the day-long waits for server changes are reduced to minutes. In other words, UCS servers can be provisioned and deployed in minutes, not days or hours like traditional serves.  The ability for UCS server to be provisioned and re-provisioned quickly, accurately and in a timely fashion is a huge advantage that is perfectly suited to both changing business conditions and movement of workloads from private to public clouds and vice versa.  Underlying UCS server infrastructure can scale up in nodes or down or change servers in minutes.  Now, with UCS Integrated Infrastructure as your cloud and business changes quickly, so can your underlying server and switching infrastructure.

UCS Integrated Infrastructure adapts to quick changes with a few pieces of revolutionary Cisco software:

1)      UCS Servers offer a unique capability through the UCS Manager of software abstraction of hardware that enable automatic, deployment and provisioning of servers.  Hardware is provisioned in software, offering numerous downstream benefits.

• Without the flexibility of the UCS Manager software, cloud building becomes much more difficult, because the underlying hardware is inflexible.  However, UCS Manager abstracts server hardware to give stateless flexibility to provisioning servers and deploying workloads.

2)      Cisco UCS Director unifies and automates end-to-end IT converged infrastructure management processes by abstracting the complexity of individual devices, hypervisors, and virtual machines.

• Cisco and non-Cisco switches and servers managed; physical, virtual, and multivendor management
• Enhancements for VMware, VCE, and EMC solution components
• Supports Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure-based and Cisco Virtual Application Container Services automated network solutions
• Integration of third-party solutions into the Cisco UCS Director management platform with a publicly available software development kit

3)      UCS Integrated Infrastructure is also optimized for most popular infrastructure cloud and other use cases, applications and technology transition points in the industry: private and hybrid cloud, desktop virtualization, enterprise and vertical applications, in-memory databases, analytics and Big Data.  Workload optimization is another attribute of the architectural benefits of UCS servers and their policy-based service profiles.  In addition, UCS Integrated Infrastructure is a record-breaking platform for the both current and future cloud workloads.

It is clear that Cisco's UCS Integrated Infrastructures when paired with EMC's storage technology in the Vblock and VSPEX portfolio delivers an important and uniquely flexible building block of the cloud. Through Cisco partnerships with cloud providers and our delivery of industry-leading solutions, IT departments will get even more flexibility in how they choose to map their applications to the best cloud model.