Cisco and Equinix Team Up on Intercloud to Cloud Exchange

Cisco and Equinix will jointly develop enterprise customer solutions that utilize Cisco’s Intercloud technologies and the Equinix Cloud Exchange to deliver more secure, resilient and efficient interconnection to public clouds.  The non-exclusive partnership aims to extend connectivity from the application layer through data center networking system to enable a seamless experience between public cloud services, such as AWS and Microsoft Azure, to enterprise networks that powered by Cisco equipment. The partnership is significant because of the shared enterprise customer base and global reach of the companies into key co-location data centers.

Some highlights:

• Cisco intends to deploy Intercloud-enabled capabilities in 16 Equinix data centers across Europe, Asia and the Americas.
• As Cisco expands its Intercloud capabilities, Equinix will be a preferred supplier, offering access to Cisco Cloud Services inside its global platform of International Business Exchange (IBX) data centers.
• Equinix intends to deploy Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) within the Equinix Cloud Exchange infrastructure to deliver application-driven policy control. It plans to deploy the key hardware and software elements of the Cisco ACI architecture in its data centers, including the Nexus 9000 Series Switch and the APIC Controller.
• Equinix has already deployed elements of the Cisco Evolved Services Platform (ESP) – an open, comprehensive orchestration and virtualization software platform on Equinix Cloud Exchange, providing real-time automation for service provisioning, over physical and virtual networks.
• Equinix, the global interconnection leader, has a global data center footprint of more than 100 data centers across 32 markets in 15 countries.  

“What Cisco and Equinix are doing together is all about visibility and control. By connecting Cisco Intercloud and Cloud Exchange, we are adding policy, performance, security and visibility all the way to the application level, removing performance concerns sometimes associated with hybrid cloud services. Elasticity is essential for enterprises, and by providing a private, high bandwidth, highly secure infrastructure, we’re allowing enterprises to achieve their vision of a truly elastic cloud,” stated Ihab Tarazi, Chief Technology Officer, Equinix.

http://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?type=webcontent&articleId=1496004