Both make moves this week to shore up cloud computing offerings
The cloud computing plots of Cisco and Juniper thickened this week through separate engagements. Cisco announced an extension of its relationship with systems management vendor BMC Software to develop a provisioning platform for cloud service providers.
Juniper acquired virtualization security vendor Altor Networks to provide tools that offer a deeper understanding of the relationship of VMs and their physical and virtual associations.
Both moves come as the vendors look to prepare for what’s expected to be a very active pattern – a front? – on the cloud horizon over the next few years. Cloud computing has been cited by industry analysts as one of three main pillars driving IT spending over the next several years; mobility and social media are the others.
As reported by colleague Ann Bednarz, Cisco’s deal with BMC is an outgrowth of the alliance they forged around UCS Manager, the control point for Cisco’s Unified Computing System data center platform. The vendors integrated Cisco UCS Manager with BMC’s Atrium CMDB and BladeLogic Service Automation products, and Cisco is also licensing the technology from BMC to include in shipments of UCS.
Under this week’s deal, the companies are jointly developing the Integrated Cloud Delivery Platform, targeted at providers that are building large-scale, multi-tenant cloud infrastructures, Bednarz reports. It is designed to enable cloud providers to eliminate many of the manual steps required to set up a cloud computing service running on an infrastructure that spans data center networks, servers, storage and applications.
Integrated Cloud Delivery combines Cisco’s Unified Service Delivery platform – a bundle of UCS, Nexus 7000 switches and the CRS-1 core router — with BMC’s cloud-computing software orchestration and management system, called Cloud LifeCycle Management.
The extended BMC deal follows last week’s acquisition of LineSider, a virtual data center provisioning and management vendor, by Cisco.
Juniper is also opting to own a piece of virtual data center management. Cisco’s rival this week plunked down $95 million on Altor Networks, a small, privately-held virtualization security company that Juniper had already invested in and partnered with.
Juniper said the acquisition will allow it to offer an integrated, scalable security architecture for data centers that is designed to protect physical and virtual systems. Altor VF, the company’s virtual firewall, is designed to stop malware outbreaks in VMs and attacks on the hypervisor; prevent workloads with different security requirements from being mixed on the same host server; and comply with auditing requirements by monitoring, reporting on and filtering virtual network traffic.
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