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Cisco: Intercloud no longer lonely wanderer – BT, Ingram Micro and pals sign up

Management issues? Check. Data sovereignty? Check

With one eye on data sovereignty issues Cisco has hauled another batch of companies onto the Intercloud bandwagon, including telcos, channel partners and cloudy service providers.

Over 30 companies yesterday signed up to support Intercloud, Cisco’s $1bn investment in what it hopes will become the default platform that allows customers to shift workloads between data centres.

Intercloud Providers (using Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and the Intercloud Fabric (IF) added to the roster include BT, Logicalis, and ANS Group; cloud builders DiData and WWT; and cloud aggregators (AKA distributors) Comstor, Ingram Micro and Tech Data.

Think of the Intercloud Fabric as the connective tissue between public and private clouds, smoothing the path for hybrid cloud management.

Rob Lloyd, president of development and sales at Cisco, said it had previously connected “isolated islands of LANs” to create the internet and planned to use Intercloud to “connect disparate cloud services”.

“The lack of ability to connect public clouds, and to move workloads and associated policies between clouds, coupled with an inability to manage public and private clouds together as a single capability, prevents IT organisations from buying cloud services from any vendor they choose," said Lloyd.

Intercloud now spans up to 250 additional data centres in 50 countries but allows for local hosting and provider options.

The addition of Deutche Telekom will see the German firm deploy Intercloud nodes within its German bit barns to deliver “sovereign” IaaS to meet the country’s strict data protection standard for biz customers “throughout the European region”, it said.

The adoption of cloud services in central Europe has been held back by data sovereignty woes and concerns, particularly in countries including Germany and Switzerland.

BT will use the IF to develop hybrid cloud services that connect with the Cisco Cloud and the stuff from managed/cloudy services providers. The BT Cloud Compute infrastructure will become Intercloud enabled, it said.

Also with workload portability in mind, Cisco welcomed on board Equinix. The pair plan to develop a hosted private cloud service that uses the Equinix Cloud Exchange, and build more connections between private and public clouds. ®

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