Cisco and IBM partner on managed private cloud offering

Cisco and IBM are out of the starter blocks with new managed private cloud-as-a-service for x86 hardware that's powered by Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS.)

The fully managed private cloud offering has two options. The first is a standard VMware-based solution while the second is a Red Hat OpenShift-based version.

In a Friday blog, Keith Dyer, a vice president in the global partner organization at Cisco that manages its IBM alliance, said private cloud environments help IT teams simplify the management of their infrastructure while providing the same benefits as traditional public cloud providers.

In order to deal with increasingly complex IT infrastructures, organizations have migrated their workloads to public clouds only to come face-to-face with new types of problems, such as security, data sovereignty, industry regulations and performance requirements for business applications.

RELATED: CenturyLink expands private cloud offerings to Dell servers

While not mentioning Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure by name, which are the two biggest public cloud providers, Dyer said that the Cisco and IBM managed private cloud service can offer the same benefits, such as a pay-per-use operating expense model that can scale as needed, as the large cloud providers.

"This is a fully managed offering delivered by IBM Services that provides the consumption and utility of a public cloud but delivered on premise," Dyer said. "There are no huge capital outlays, no surprise pricing and no long-term commitments."

As a managed service, IBM installs and manages the compute environment while also providing tools for support and upgrade requests. Dyer also said the solution placed a high priority on security, proactive mentoring and reporting. To achieve those priorities, IBM is using Cisco Intersight and its own decades-long experience managing customers' infrastructures. Cisco Intersight provides proactive support for Cisco UCS.

Launched in 2009, Cisco UCS is a data center server computer product line composed of computing hardware, virtualization support, switching fabric, and management software.

IBM is one of only five certified Cisco Global Gold partners.

"By combining the best of Cisco’s data center portfolio and IBM Services, together the two companies deliver an on and off premises private cloud to our customers in a way that reduces risk, complexity, and provides an un-paralleled experience," Dyer said. "Ultimately, customers gain the flexibility to grow their businesses un-encumbered by IT constraints."