Cisco Outlines Plans for Enterprise Clouds, IaaS

Cisco Systems (CSCO) this week bolstered its cloud infrastructure offerings to enterprises and service providers by developing separate design guides for those respective markets. The guides present validated designs that enable enterprises and service providers to develop cloud infrastructures using Cisco gear and partner software.

The Secure Multi-Tenancy into Virtualized Data Centers guide is aimed at enterprises wanting to build clouds and is published with NetApp and VMware. It describes the design of what the vendors calls the Secure Cloud Architecture, which is based on Cisco Nexus Series Switches and the Cisco Unified Computing System, NetApp FAS storage with MultiStore, and VMware vSphere and vShield Zones.

The vendors said the architecture "isolates IT resources for enhanced security in shared virtual and enterprise cloud environments." The guide provides details about implementing and configuring the architecture. The partners said they have "streamlined" customer support to provide a 24-hour "cooperative support model" for issues related to the products used in the architecture.

Cisco also this week quietly released details of its infrastructure-as-a-service offering for service providers. As with the secure multi-tenancy architecture for enterprises, Cisco's offering to help service providers build IaaS is based on existing Cisco gear, namely Cisco Unified Service Delivery (USD), which combines Cisco's CRS-1 core Internet router, Nexus 7000 data center switches and UCS. Cisco has developed a 600-page Design and Implementation Guide to help service providers build a data center for IaaS.

The design guide helps to shorten the time it takes for service providers to design, implement and build a data center for IaaS from between six to 12 months to between one and two months. The time to build a fully virtualized environment for IaaS customers is cut from three to six months to days and minutes, said Simon Aspinall, Cisco senior director of service provider marketing for service provider data centers.

The document was tested with several service providers, including Saavis and Terremark, and is available only to Cisco customers. Cisco also developed an Iaas ROI and Configuration Tool that aims to help service providers calculate how much it would cost to power an IaaS platform and presents possible revenue models.