"What Cisco and Equinix are doing together is all about visibility and control," said Ihab Tarazi, CTO of Equinix. "By connecting Cisco Intercloud and Cloud Exchange, we are adding policy, performance, security and visibility all the way to the application level, removing performance concerns sometimes associated with hybrid cloud services."
Intercloud, often described as "the cloud of clouds," is a global network of interconnected clouds that strives to overcome the common concerns often associated with cloud environments. More specifically, the goal is to minimize concerns associated with cloud security and performance and challenges around utilizing private and public clouds. Cisco and Equinix plan to accomplish this by offering enterprises secure access to cloud service providers, leveraging both Equinix Cloud Exchange and Cisco's Intercloud ecosystems.
To achieve this, Equinix is deploying several Cisco technologies and services across its data centers, including Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), Cisco's Nexus 9000 series switch, Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) and Cisco's Evolved Services Platform. The company has already deployed some of the components and is working to add in more over the course of the next few months, though timeframes are still being developed, Chris Sharp, VP of cloud innovation at Equinix told Tom's IT Pro. By utilizing Cisco's ACI and Evolved Services Platform (ESP), Equinix is providing customers with "application-driven" policy control along with automation and real-time provisioning of services over physical and virtual networks. Additionally, Cisco will be deploying its Intercloud-enabled capabilities in 16 of Equinix's global markets, including Europe, Asia and the Americas. As a result, Equinix will be able to offer access to Cisco Cloud Services inside its International Business Exchange (IBX) data centers.
Equinix Cloud Exchange enables direct and on-demand access to a variety of cloud providers (currently, over 450 cloud service providers including Amazon, Microsoft, GoGrid, CloudSigma, Blue Blox and more), using multiple networks around the globe, giving enterprises secure access to multiple cloud resource. With the addition of Cisco's intercloud technologies, this multi-cloud access will get faster, more secure and resilient.
"Equinix will bring its global data center hosting and interconnection capabilities to the Cisco Intercloud partner ecosystem -- a move that will help shorten the distance between public and private clouds for enterprise customers," said Nick Earle, SVP, Global Cloud Sales and Go-to-market at Cisco. "By creating hosted private clouds and utilizing the interconnection capabilities of the Equinix Cloud Exchange we will create a robust destination where our enterprise customers can experience the full benefits of the Intercloud."
To learn more about Equinix Cloud Exchange, visit equinix.com; to learn more about Cisco's Intercloud fabric, product and services, visit cisco.com.
Toms It Pro
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