WWT, Cisco and Google Combine to Bring a New Edge to Cloud Services

Let the conferences begin

It's here! IT conference season for 2019, filled with scores of announcements.

WWT was proud to attend the most recent Google Cloud Next '19. It was an exciting couple of days spent learning and networking with our customers and partners about the latest innovations in containers, networking, DevOps and much more.

I'm most excited about new innovations surrounding Google Cloud's Anthos. In fact, my illustrious colleague John Weeks just wrote an article on that topic. Make sure to give it a read as well.

WWT, Google and Cisco combine

In the spirit of announcements, I have the privilege of making one of my own. WWT is proud to announce our partnership to deliver a Cisco reference design for Google Cloud's Anthos in our Advanced Technology Center (ATC).

This partnership builds on the work we announced last year at Cisco Live, when Cisco and Google first revealed their cloud collaboration. The Cisco reference design for Anthos is the culmination of innovations from both Cisco and Google over 2018.

Google brings the ability to manage, monitor and visualize Kubernetes and Istio across cloud and on-prem with Anthos. Cisco brings best-of-breed hybrid cloud infrastructure and security leadership. Together, they offer an enterprise-ready end-to-end hybrid cloud architecture for Google Cloud.

Hybrid cloud platforms

To understand the significance of this announcement, here is a quick look at the last year in hybrid cloud. A trend emerged in 2018: hybrid cloud became less about simply deploying workloads to public and private and more about building consistency — both functionally and operationally — between private and public clouds. WWT calls this space hybrid cloud platforms.

Solutions have existed in this space for a while, but in 2018, they were validated by continued investment and rapid pace of innovation. We see this driven by customer desire to run workloads where they make most sense for their business.

This may be close to the data, close to the user or on the most cost-effective platform. The shift to cloud native, and Kubernetes in particular, is a huge driver of cloud innovation and adoption. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) says 58 percent of customers are now using Kubernetes in production!

Building a complete solution

Cisco's reference design for Google Cloud's Anthos is a joint development between Cisco and Google to provide infrastructure that is highly optimized to support and integrate with Google Cloud.

Kubernetes started at Google, and they have only picked up their pace of investment and innovation. Network and security integrations, always core to Cisco's strategy, are front and center with Cisco ACI, SD-WAN and Stealthwatch Cloud. In the data center, HyperFlex offers the compute foundation optimized for scale and management with Intersight. At the branch, extend the container footprint with HyperFlex Edge.

Cisco and Google in action

With that quick introduction to the solution, here is a real-world use case. Customers love using Google's exceptional artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) and compute capabilities to train their models against massive datasets in record time. With Cisco reference design for Anthos, those same customers can use KubeFlow to serve those models up closer to the user for immediate results. That may be in the data center or at the edge — wherever the model is most valuable.

Alternatively, many customers have data that is not ready for the cloud. With this solution, customers could use KubeFlow coupled with HyperFlex and GPUs to accelerate proprietary AI/ML work in a secured and controlled environment.

There, customers can both train their models and serve them locally. They might also want to use proprietary data to develop models on-prem (fraud detection and Internet of Things (IoT) analytics would be great examples), then push them to the cloud to perform predictive analysis on live requests.

Be the first to innovate with WWT

So where does WWT fit in? Modern IT must leverage the public cloud to move with the speed and agility necessary to meet digital initiatives. However, many applications — or components of applications — need to live on-premises or in an off-premises hosting facility.

WWT understands how to align the right cloud services to application workloads, whether that application lives on-prem, off-prem or in the public cloud. We define this end-to-end optimized workload placement as multicloud architecture.

We leverage the power of the ATC ecosystem to validate multicloud architectures, like Cisco's reference design for Google Cloud's Anthos. We're uniquely positioned to assist with multicloud architecture, addressing the knowledge and architectural gaps preventing customers from achieving sustainable outcomes.

WWT not only provides skilled resources with deep enterprise-class cloud expertise, but we help customers and partners create strategies that enable flexibility in workload placement. We have expertise and depth across key areas such as data management, security, networking, governance, operations and automation.

Keep an eye out for continued updates as WWT continues to innovate with Cisco and Google in the ATC. You could be among the first to get hands-on time with this new offering! Just reach out to us here.