Cisco has announced that it will stop its Cisco Intercloud Services (CIS) in March 2017, and the existing workloads will be moved to other infrastructure. A spokesperson of the company confirmed that some may even be moved to the public cloud, depending on the nature of the workload, though it did not specify which public cloud will be chosen for this move.
This is a part of Cisco’s cloud strategy, and has been in the pipeline for some time now. In October, it announced a timeline to move its workloads to other private and public, and according to that document, the last date to order CIS through point-of-sale mechanism is March 31, 2017. It is not known if support for CIS would also end on the same date, or if there will be an extension based on a case-by-case basis. According to Kip Compton, Vice-President for Cloud Platform and Services, all clients on CIS would be fully migrated by the specified deadline.
Cisco has stated that it’s evolving customer demands have led the company to change its cloud strategy. According to a release, Cisco believes that the cloud industry has undergone massive transformation over the last two years, and many of its customers are looking to develop applications that would drive their digital transformations. In the light of these developments, the company believes its best to move away from CIS, and focus on other aspects of it cloud business. Some reports show that Cisco is planning to focus extensively on enterprise hybrid cloud and SP network virtualization, to ensure that its existing resources are being utilized to the optimum.
The concept of intercloud was introduced by Cisco in 2014, to make it easy for cloud providers to move their data between different clouds. This was hugely beneficial to many companies, as they could offer better service to their customers by moving workloads to clouds that were closer to the customers’ location.
CIS’ Intercloud comprises of computing, storage, and networking services, that are on par with some of the leading cloud platforms such as Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. CIS offered Virtual Machine instances that were optimized for general purpose workloads, as well as instances that were optimized for compute, storage, and memory. In addition, it gives customers a wide range of operating system choices that include Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, and Windows operating system. It is based on OpenStack – the open source cloud software.
It is worthy to note that HP also launched an intercloud service in the past and killed it, while Dell made plans to launch an Openstack-based cloud, but later moved away from it. Rackspace, the company that helped develop OpenStack, has stopped offering cloud services on it. All these companies have moved away from intercloud, as they believe that it does not play an important role in the cloud market at this point in time. In the future, if the cloud industry transforms to accept intercloud, then maybe they will start thinking about it again.
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