Cisco Intercloud Fabric - Overview

1. Overview

Cisco Intercloud Fabric is a highly secure, open and flexible hybrid cloud solution that enables in workload placement as per the customer’s business needs in leveraging public cloud environments. Using Intercloud Fabric, customers can build secure hybrid clouds, ensure the enterprise policies such as network, security, and access control are extended to public cloud environments.
Intercloud Fabric for Business enables enterprises to build secure hybrid clouds through a choice of providers. Key benefits include:

• Self-service consumption of hybrid resources with end-user and IT portals

• Workload provisioning migration across on-premises and cloud resources

• End-to-end security with consistent policy enforcement across the hybrid cloud

• A choice of cloud providers and hypervisors

• Self-service workload deployment: Cisco Intercloud Fabric allows end users to easily deploy workloads across various public clouds or migrate workloads across clouds. It offers a built-in administration and end-user portal as well as rich northbound APIs for automation.

• End-to-end security: Cisco Intercloud Fabric provides end-to-end cryptographic secure connectivity from private to public clouds and security within the public cloud for data in motion.

• Consistent networking capabilities: Cisco Intercloud Fabric provides Layer 2 network extension from private to public clouds, helping ensure application transparency. It includes integrated switching, routing, and virtual firewall and NAT capabilities.

• Bidirectional workload mobility: Cisco Intercloud Fabric allows workloads to be migrated from private to public clouds and back. It includes automatic image conversion to the desired cloud format, so virtual machines can be placed on or migrated to any cloud.

• Choice: Cisco Intercloud Fabric provides choice of cloud providers and hypervisors.

2. Architectures

• Cisco Intercloud Fabric Director serves as the end-user and IT portal for provisioning and management of the public cloud extension. This single console provides visibility into virtual machines in private clouds along with complete lifecycle management for virtual machines running in public clouds. It is also used for managing cloud network services. Cisco Intercloud Fabric provides open APIs, which allow integration of third-party management tools.

• Cisco Intercloud Fabric Secure Cloud Extension provides a secure Layer 2 extension from the enterprise data center to the cloud. It includes Cisco Intercloud Fabric Extender virtual machines placed on the private cloud and Cisco Intercloud Fabric Switch virtual machines placed on the public cloud to provide secure connectivity using the standard datagram transport layer security mechanism.