In case you missed the Red Hat Summit in San Francisco, it was most certainly an event well-worth attending .... there was even a wedding! Yes, that is not a typo. During the second day general session, Red Hat held an actual wedding ceremony. If you needed any tangible sign to convince yourself of the creativity of the Open Source community, well .... this should rank pretty high .. at least in terms of originality.

If we get philosophical for a minute, marriage signals a long-term commitment. And open source projects would not be successful without the commitment of the community, the various vendors and you the lone star developer sharing your intellectual property for the common good. It is hard to imagine how cloud could have reached its current levels of adoption without the support of the open source community. And open source may still be what is required to bring cloud adoption to the next level. Let's take OpenStack for example. One of the top business drivers associated with the adoption of OpenStack -as reported by the annual OpenStack User Survey -is to'Standardize on the same open platform and APIs that power a global network of public and private clouds'.That is quickly followed by"Avoid vendor lock-in with an open platform, including flexibility of underlying technology choices"Can OpenStack become the 'de-facto' standard to build hybrid clouds?

It is indeed about offering choice. Cisco has been an active participant in numerous Open Source projects and we continue to be committed to OpenStack to meet our customer needs. Many of our customers have in place a continuum of applications that have to be developed, updated and supported. They rangefromtraditional to cloud-native applications in what is an incredibly fast-moving market. To support a continuum of application requirements, you also need flexibility of cloud consumption models. With our growing cloud portfolio and partner ecosystem, we bring you that flexibility of consumption models so that you can choose the 'right cloud for the right crowd'.

These are exactly some of the topics I tackled during my short presentations (minus the wedding part). When it comes to OpenStack in conjunction with our partner ecosystem we can provide you with a broader set of choices.

• For organizations that want a faster, easier way to implement OpenStack-based private clouds and achieve business value... Cisco in collaboration with Intel and Red Hat offers an integrated infrastructure and cloud platform solution, deployed according to validated, proven designs. Our Cisco UCS with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform solution is well-suited for organizations that want maximum flexibility regarding their ability to customize their OpenStack environment and already have (or are willing to acquire) OpenStack expertise.
• Conversely, if you cannot or do not want to be in the business of managing OpenStack, Cisco Metapod allows you to consume OpenStack 'as a service'. Cisco Metapod? is a Private Cloud as a Service offer that combines Cisco cloud infrastructure (Cisco UCS and Cisco Nexus), a powerful platform powered by OpenStack, and a team of experts who manage and operate the environment 24x7x365. Cisco Metapod can be delivered in your data center, or a colo facility of your choosing. Once the hardware is deployed by you or a Cisco partner, the OpenStack platform is deployed by a dedicated team of experts and becomes production ready in two weeks. In essence, the solution is in your data center, on your hardware and delivered as a service.

If you want to learn more about the solution, you can check out the short slide deck we posted on SlideShare

and then dive deeper by visiting the following web sites:

• Cisco Metapod Website
• Cisco OpenStack Website
• Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform