• Future Cloud Event showcases new hybrid cloud innovations
• Cisco says its overall aim is to enable customers to realize better outcomes from the cloud
• Focuses on ‘Observability and Insights’

Cisco’s latest updated cloud offerings  - the UCS X-Series - were recently announced at its ‘Future Cloud’ event . The new UCS (Unified Computing System) X-Series, was  positioned as  its  hybrid cloud compute platform for the next decade. 

And Cisco has joined an increasingly crowded field in the hybrid cloud space - Dell, HPE, IBM/Red Hat to name but three - and has set itself the task of fitting in by providing products which, yes, provide a hardware based processing platform, but are there mostly to plug gaps and provide cloud managers with ‘observability’. What is that? As it sounds - systems which sit there watching what other systems are doing and calculating how well they’re doing it. And yes, this is absolutely key to the smooth development of a hybrid cloud environment 

So its ‘Hybrid Cloud Operations’ include:

Intersight Cloud Orchestrator: This provides a low-code, easy-to-use automation framework that simplifies complex workflows, so IT Ops can easily orchestrate infrastructure and workloads and accelerate delivery of services.

Intersight Workload Engine: A powerful platform for modern, cloud native workloads. Built on an open-source Kubernetes and Kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) foundation using container-native virtualization, Intersight Workload Engine is a Cisco operating system for HyperFlex, featuring consistent SaaS management.

Cisco Service Mesh Manager: A new extension to the Intersight Kubernetes Service, bringing deep observability and simplified management with policy-based security and intuitive visualization of services topologies across K8s clusters on-prem and in the cloud.

Cisco Cloud ACI (  Application Centric Infrastructure)

It’s available on AWS, Azure, and now on Google Cloud with general availability in the Fall of 2021. The Cloud ACI  common policy and operating model drastically reduces the cost and complexity of managing hybrid and multicloud deployments,Cisco claims.

Observability and Insights

Integration of ThousandEyes Internet and Cloud Intelligence with the Cisco Catalyst® 8000 Edge Series for SD-WAN and Cisco Nexus® 9000 switches for data centers to provide customers with valuable insights on network health and application performance by monitoring across campus, branch, data centers, and every point of the WAN network between the user and applications.

Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator acts as a single pane of glass for configuring and managing common policies across multiple on-prem ACI sites, AWS and Microsoft Azure regions, and, announcing today, coming this fall to Google Cloud.

Intersight Cloud Orchestrator: Provides a low-code, easy-to-use framework to create and automate complex workflows, so IT Ops can easily orchestrate infrastructure and workloads and accelerate delivery of services.

It’s fitting somehow that a Cisco online virtual event is being deployed to explain and promote what is essentially a set of virtual products constructed in software like the event itself - a far cry from the Cisco of old (going back a bit here) when it was all heavy metal and blinking LED lights - things you could display on an exhibition stand.

It still does that of course -  in the form of its UCS X-Series and other compute  and network platforms  - but now the virtual has taken over and Cisco is showcasing how its own cloud strategy is about helping “businesses connect, secure, and automate to deliver seamless digital experiences in today’s hybrid cloud world,” to use its own marketing patter.