It's taken a bit of time but vendors are now beginning to address the underlying network infrastructure as a means of improving cloud performance.
Cisco is the latest company to pull the different strands of cloud into one platform by launching CloudVerse.
Announcing the launch, Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior said that CloudVerse was based on three elements: the Unified Datacentre, the Cloud Intelligent Network, and Cloud Applications and Services. She said that Cisco was ahead of the competition by being the only company with the "networking DNA" to make this vision a reality.
To support the new launch, Cisco has announced two new Unified Management capabilities: Cisco Intelligent Automation for the Cloud has been designed to provide automated provisioning and management of datacentre resources, while the Network Services Manager will be used to apply physical and virtual networking resources on demand.
Cisco will also be introducing a new element to its Intelligent Network offering. The Network Positioning System, which will be introduced on the ASR 1000 and 9000 routers (to be launched next year), will enable more dynamic provisioning of workloads between data centres and clouds. According to Cisco's own Cloud Index, announced last week, predicted that cloud traffic will be half of all datacentre workloads by 2014. The company also announced a range of new features to its Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) for service providers.
Cisco has already signed up an impressive list of launch customers, including Terremark, Orange Business Services, Qualcomm, Fujitsu and LinkedIn.
Warrior said the more efficient delivery of CloudVerse meant that companies could be looking at cost savings of up to 50 per cent,; a figure that was endorsed by some of its customers. Kerry Bailey president of Terremark agreed he would be able to half his network expenditure.
