We hear from enterprises today that they want an open, faster, more reliable way to modernize and move to the cloud in order to transform their IT and gain real business benefits such as agility, faster market responsiveness and more rapid innovation.

To do this, they need to be able to quickly build, test and deploy applications in a modern, microservices-based architecture across on-premises and public cloud environments.

As enterprises adopt this model, Kubernetes is a choice for orchestration, and we have seen that many enterprises use Kubernetes to enable applications that are both VM-based and containerized, running on public cloud, private cloud and on-premises. Configuring and managing Kubernetes across these hybrid cloud environments can be complicated, however. It often requires both manual effort and multiple tools. In addition, organizations want to be able to use the same tools to manage and support the lifecycle of existing applications.

IBM and Cisco join forces

IBM and Cisco are expanding our work together to deliver a common and secured Kubernetes experience across on-premises and public cloud environments that is designed to help customers simplify the development, deployment and management of applications.

As part of our expanded collaboration, we are announcing support for IBM Cloud Private on Cisco HyperFlex and HyperFlex Edge hyperconverged infrastructure. This includes enabling the new IBM Cloud Pak for Applications to support Cisco’s HyperFlex hyperconverged infrastructure. IBM Cloud Paks are designed to deliver enterprise-ready containerized software solutions to give you an open, faster, more secured way to move your core business applications to the cloud. In addition, IBM is adding support for Cisco ACI Software Defined Networking and Cisco AppDynamics Application Performance Monitoring tool with IBM Cloud Private. We are also announcing the availability of Cisco ACI vPOD running on IBM Cloud bare metal servers.

With Cisco’s Virtual Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), customers can extend their network fabric from on-premises to the IBM Cloud. Through the IBM Services team, customers can implement Virtual ACI easily on their IBM Cloud. Virtual ACI is a software-only solution that can be deployed wherever customers have at least two servers on which can run the VMware ESXi hypervisor. With IBM Cloud, enterprises can also utilize extensive IBM global cloud data center footprint and high value services, including the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service and capabilities ranging from analytics and AI to blockchain and IoT.

More broadly, IBM and Cisco are working together on a hybrid cloud architecture that builds upon expertise from both companies:

• IBM delivers hybrid cloud solutions that include open source components, such as Kubernetes, Open Whisk, Knative, Istio, Cloud Foundry and Prometheus, as well as an extensive catalog of IBM enterprise software and open source software. IBM has multi-zone public cloud regions deployed across the world with services from infrastructure including bare metal, virtual and container services, to developer and data services.
• Cisco brings enterprise-class data center, networking and analytics.

The new hybrid cloud architecture is engineered to reduce the complexity of running Kubernetes across on-premises and public cloud environments. With IBM Multicloud Manager, enterprises can have a single place to manage multiple clusters running across multiple on-premises, public and private cloud environments, providing consistent visibility, governance and automation from on-premises to the edge. With its multicluster approach to application deployment—both cloud-native and modernized—workloads can be automatically deployed across clusters with governance and manageability.

Modernize with hybrid cloud

Through our expanded collaboration, IBM and Cisco are helping enterprises modernize applications with consistency across hybrid cloud environments, whether bare metal, VMs or containers. Together, we are collaborating to help enterprises reduce the inconsistencies and potential risks between on-premises environments and the public cloud when deploying containerized infrastructure to modernize and manage applications.

Learn more

Read the blog post by Kaustubh Das, Vice President of Product Management at Cisco, to understand more about this unique collaboration and learn how enterprises can modernize applications with consistency across hybrid environments.

Visit IBM Cloud Pak for Applications to learn more about building, testing and deploying applications in a modernized way.

The move to cloud is a journey. Wherever you are, IBM meets you there.