Cisco announced last week it is expanding its Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS®) Solutions portfolio by offering Microsoft Azure Stack on Cisco® UCS. Cisco Microsoft joint solution enables organizations to deliver Microsoft Azure services from their on-premises data center. Thus, they can modernize their applications in a highly flexible and scalable hybrid cloud environment.

As cloud has become a main stream technology, businesses are looking for simple-to-manage hybrid cloud solutions that can optimize resources and scale on demand, while retaining on-premises benefits.

According to Cisco Microsoft announcement, their solution provides to businesses full control over how they manage governance, security, and performance. This is achieved through the combination of Microsoft’s robust Azure cloud platform with the industry-leading Cisco UCS into an integrated system designed specifically for cloud workloads.

Microsoft mentions that as Azure Stack provides services and application programming interfaces (APIs) compatible with the Azure public cloud, it allows developers to do their best work while giving them the agility to deploy their applications to public, private or hosted clouds. Service providers can deliver Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure as-a-service (Iaas) and platform-as-a-service (Paas), while the Cisco Microsoft joint solution offers high-performance networking with the versatile Cisco Virtual Interface Card optimized for Azure Stack.

A key benefit of the joint solution is simplification of management and control.
Management & control benefit

The joint solution simplifies management and control by allowing the operators to use a single pane of glass for managing all elements of compute and networking. Management through policy-based templates is now possible across both technology domains, reducing the total cost of ownership for joint customers.

We expect the solution to quickly become a success story, as Cisco and Microsoft are proven innovators and market leaders in hybrid cloud infrastructures.

 

Availability

Cisco Integrated System for Azure Stack is targeted for availability in Q3 2017.