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I have been emphasizing again and again that there won’t be a consolidation around few cloud infrastructure players. Then, the idea of private clouds is also not going away anytime in the near future (even though I see public clouds as the future for many workloads). Finally, there are these SaaS vendors and web application providers who are building their own datacenters for their consumption. All these things are keeping IaaS market hot and Cisco is jumping in to offer a comprehensive Infrastructure as a Service solution for service providers.

Web 2.0 and the next cloud based generation has changed the way service is provided over the net. The depth and breadth of services has increased manifold from massive video services to big data to mashups, etc.. Not only that, the way these services are consumed has changed considerably with unexpected spikes. All these trends points out to a need for an agile next generation infrastructure that is more flexible and cost effective. Many different vendors are trying to get a big slice of this pie but Cisco seems to be surging far ahead of the competitors.

Late last week, Cisco announced a new IaaS for Service Providers offering using their UCS and IP-NGN products. They offer the service providers with the tools, design guides and advanced services to be able to “fast-track” the implementation of IaaS offerings. In short, any service provider can deploy agile, flexible, low cost, highly scalable IaaS solutions without worrying too much about the cost or other logistical issues. These solutions are built for scale, thereby, offering the much needed elasticity for the IaaS. Their low cost makes it easy for the service providers to offered metered billing.

This offering by Cisco includes UCS for the compute, VMWare’s ESX Vi4 Hypervisor for the virtual machines, Cisco Nexus™ 1000V for virtual access, their best of the breed switch products like Redundant Cisco Nexus 5020 Series Switches, Redundant Cisco 7600 Series Routers, etc.. This unified offering provides service providers a solution to offer their customers the flexibility of capacity on-demand, at scale with multitenant capabilities to maximize the use of their infrastructure across multiple customers.

Such unified solutions by companies like Cisco makes it easy for service providers to offer cloud computing solutions to businesses of all forms and shapes. With VMWare running on a hot streak, I am wondering how long it will be before Cisco acquires EMC and VMWare 🙂

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Krishnan Subramanian

Krish dons several avatars including entrepreneur in exile, analyst cum researcher, technology evangelist, blogger, ex-physicist, social/political commentator, etc.. My main focus is research and analysis on various high impact topics in the fields of Open Source, Cloud Computing and the interface between them. I also evangelize Open Source and Cloud Computing in various media outlets, blogs and other public forums. I offer strategic advise to both Cloud Computing and Open Source providers and, also, help other companies take advantage of Open Source and Cloud Computing. In my opinion, Open Source commoditized software and Cloud Computing commoditized computing resources. A combination of these two developments offers a strong competitive advantage to companies of all sizes and shapes. Due to various factors, including fear, the adoption of both Open Source and Cloud Computing are relatively slow in the business sector. So, I take it upon myself to clear any confusion in this regard and educate, enrich and advise users/customers to take advantage of the benefits offered by these technologies. I am also a managing partner in two consulting companies based in India. I blog about Open Source topics at http://open.krishworld.com and Cloud Computing related topics at http://www.cloudave.com.

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