Why Our Partnership With Cisco is Crucial on the Road to Cloud

In Logicalis we see the cloud as the future. With our “Application Anywhere” vision we are following exactly what our customers require – putting more focus on the application, and providing the flexible infrastructure in accordance with cutting-edge hybrid cloud methodologies.

We are able to build a flexible underlay for our customers, so that they can build their applications however they like and wherever they like, using Virtual Machines or Microservices, in secure, single or multicloud environments, and give them the choice of the economic and end-to-end technical model of their preference.

Logicalis has recently been named a Cisco Global Gold partner, which makes us proud and happy for so many reasons.

Why is our partnership with Cisco so important?

Cisco’s technology, and intent-based approach are perfectly aligned with our “Application Anywhere” approach. Cisco allows us to build the right infrastructure for our customers, based on a Cisco + Logicalis Hybrid Cloud Validated Design.

Cisco understands what Cloud is all about.

Let me explain the important technologies and concepts that support this statement:

• Cisco’s Intent-Based approach and their Intent-Based Data Center
• The UCS and HyperFlex evolution using Cisco Intersight
• Analytics in the Data Center enabled by Cisco Tetration
• Cisco CloudCenter and ACI Anywhere
• Their vision and product approach on containers and Microservices

What is Intent-based Data Center and What Does That Mean for Your Customers?

Apps are the new business, just like our customers’ customer is the business developer. Intent based networking is really about building networking in accordance to that, follow the intent of the developers in the networking space. This means that what we used to call policy, we should actually call intent.

What is Cisco Intersight?

Basically with Cisco Intersight the idea is to achieve Application Continuity at the Compute level, and also at the Networking and Security level. This means that we need something to keep coherent policies around our clouds. Intersight is a step in that direction, being the intelligent management cloud platform for Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and HyperFlex.

Why is Tetration so Important?

Because reacting based on the incidents in our Data Center is the thing of the past. Our Customers want to be able to proactively operate their Cloud environments, and Predict the behavior in order to adopt the Cloud before it “breaks”. This is what Tetration enables us to do; complete visibility of all our applications in the Data Center.

What is CloudCenter, and What’s “ACI Anywhere” About?

Cisco CloudCenter is an Application-centric Cloud Management Platform done right, with the appropriate brokering tools, and support for all the major public clouds. One of the ideas of the entire cloud native approach – that CloudCenter supports – is to be able to define a policy model, which includes connectivity, security and other policies, and apply it regardless of whether your workloads are in the public or private cloud. In UCS we have Service Profiles, while in the Cloud Center and ACI we have Application Profiles. At the moment, in ACI these only apply in the Data Center, where our ACI is. There are 4000+ customers deploying ACI at the moment (January 2018). Why not extend this Policy Model to the Public Cloud? Imagine how happy the hybrid cloud fans, such as myself, will be when this becomes the reality.

ACI Anywhere has a simple objective: take the ACI policy model to the Cloud. The new Data Center should be a Data Center build for a multicloud world, so what needs to be done is a consistent management paradigm across clouds. ACI Multi Site controller allows us to control ACI on different sites using a single management platform, where you can choose the Tenants that are “stretched” across multiple ACIs, and the ones that are local to them.

To sum up: ACI Anywhere = ACI Multi Site + ACI in Public Cloud

What about Containers and Micro Services?

Containers are the part of the new reality, because even though not many customers are actually using them at the moment – everyone is looking at them. Kubernetes is, in accordance with that, made a crucial part of ACI. We’ve already tested Kubernetes and OpenShift integration with ACI in Logicalis European Demo Center, and I must say that I’m impressed. A step in the right direction.

Logicalis at Cisco Live! 2018 in Barcelona

Logicalis will have a pretty strong presence at Cisco Live this year.  Among other things:

• At the World of Solutions, we will be doing demos on Multicloud environments management with Cisco CloudCenter during the entire five days.
• We have been invited to the Data Center Networking event on Tuesday, 30th, where we will talk about our experiences with ACI at different clients around Europe.
• We are participating in a roundtable with Cisco and a group of selected partners at a Cloud Day on Tuesday, 30th, where we will share our perspective on customer cloud use cases.

Logicalis and Cisco’s strategic partnership spans in excess of 20 successful years, during which we’ve embraced Cisco’s most advanced solutions and innovative technology advancements. With a perfect alignment in strategies on the road to Multicloud, it seems that we have years of an even greater collaboration ahead of us.