Cisco Teams Up with BMC for Joint Cloud Solution

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Cisco and BMC are joining forces for a new cloud delivery platform that aims to enable service providers to deploy and secure cloud services.

The new solution integrates Cisco’s unified service delivery networking hardware with BMC’s Cloud LifeCycle Management (CLM) solution. With the integrated cloud delivery platform, Cisco and BMC are aiming to accelerate cloud service adoption.

“The objective of the new solution that we’re announcing is to take large scale, multi-tenant, secure cloud computing and make it much easier for service providers to put in place and deliver large scale cloud computing services,” Simon Aspinall, senior director at Cisco told InternetNews.com

BMC and Cisco have multiple partnerships, including one around Cisco’s Unified Computing System. According to both Cisco and BMC, the integrated cloud delivery platform goes beyond what the two partners have already been delivering to the market.

The integrated cloud delivery platform is a joint solution from BMC and Cisco, and will be sold as a single solution. Aspinall noted that Cisco and BMC have an OEM relationship and the integrated cloud delivery platform will be sold by both companies.

At the heart of the cloud delivery solution is the integration of BMC’s Cloud LifeCycle Management (CLM) with Cisco’s UCS. BMC CLM helps to enable a front end end-user portal for rapid cloud service deployment. Jason Andrew, vice-president at BMC Software, explained to InternetNews.com that the solution also helps service providers to find and build out a catalogue of available cloud services. Additionally CLM, provides service orchestration capabilities for all the underlying technology components required to enable cloud service delivery.

Automation tools are also a key part of CLM, which provides provisioning, configuration, and patch management capabilities.

“So the service provider can actually deliver and provide a full application environment off a single click front-end portal,” Andrew said.

According to Aspinall, one of the key challenges of cloud adoption is about making it easy to actually get started with a cloud service, while maintaining proper security. The security component of the joint BMC Cisco solution is an approach called secure network containers.

“So within the data center you’ve got some pre-configured networking capabilities that are very easy to put in place via the management system that either physically or logically will secure the data for single customer,” Aspinall said. “They enable you to very rapidly stand up cloud services for customers, but keep them very separate from other customers on the same infrastructure.”

Aspinall noted that the secure network containers are enabled by Cisco’s networking hardware, while it is the BMC software that makes it easy for service providers to provision cloud services with the containers to ensure secure.

Cisco has multiple cloud delivery partnerships including the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition with EMC and VMware. According to Aspinall, the new joint BMC Cisco solution is complementary to what the VCE is doing.

“VCE will be using the product that BMC and Cisco is now announcing as a one of the building blocks within their solution offering,” Aspinall said. “BMC is not part of VCE, but there is a fairly close working relationship between the partners.”

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.