Sky's the limit for Cisco Intercloud

Interconnected providers, all using ACI APIC, will number in the thousands, company says

By 2018, 78% of all workloads will be in the cloud, according to Cisco. Seventy percent of those workloads will be private cloud-related, cloud traffic will quadruple between now and then, and SaaS is and will remain the most popular service model.

By that time, Cisco will have over 1,000 federated Intercloud partners and participants, be they public cloud providers or private cloud enterprises, said Rob Lloyd, president of development and sales, at last week's Global Editors Conference. Intercloud is Cisco’s billions of dollars effort to build a global cloud network capable of workload mobility between private enterprises and different providers.

Cisco has 45 Intercloud partners now and expects that number to double by year end, 2015. Thousands of Intercloud partners are possible, Lloyd says.

Cisco also plans to expand the stable of converged cloud infrastructure partners it works with beyond EMC’s VCE company, NetApp, Red Hat and the recently recruited IBM. It also plans converged infrastructure offerings with Microsoft and Hitachi Data Systems, Lloyd says. Such an ecosystem will allow workloads from, for example, VMware vSphere environments (presumably on VCE systems) to move into clouds that are not based on vSphere, Lloyd said.

Every one of these platforms will include Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and APIC controller, and Intercloud Fabric products. These products are the foundational underpinnings of any infrastructure that wants to participate in the Cisco Intercloud.

Cisco says it currently has 1000+ Nexus 9000/ACI-ready customers, 200+ of which are using the APIC controller in various stages of trial and production. So currently, 25% are Intercloud partners.

With Intercloud partners expected to number in the thousands by the end of this decade, you can visualize the trajectory for Nexus 9000 and APIC.

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