Networking giant Cisco has agreed to acquire cloud management firm Cloupia for $125m.
Cloupia offers software that helps companies to automate the management of their data centres. This is an area Cisco has been very active in since the launch of it Unified Computing System (UCS) in 2009. UCS is a converged infrastructure platform combining compute, network, storage access and virtualisation resources in a single system.
Cisco sees Cloupia’s technology fitting into its management capabilities as it enables enterprises to manage the deployment and configuration of physical and virtual infrastructure from one console, the company said in a statement.
The technology can help organisations to manage computing power, network services, storage and virtual machines from the one console. Cisco says this reduces IT admin workload as well as costs.
Hilton Romanski, head of Corporate Business Development at Cisco, added that the acquisition will enable Cisco to provide, "single pane-of-glass management across Cisco and partner solutions including FlexPod, VSPEX, and Vblock."
"[Cisco’s] strategy involves the delivery of the industry’s most comprehensive data centre networking portfolio, which includes physical and virtual products that support multiple hypervisors and storage stacks," said David Yen, senior vice president and general manager, Cisco Data Center Business Group.
"The addition of Cloupia’s automation software enhances the efficiency of such unified data centre infrastructures, helping to accelerate the transition from physical to cloud environments more quickly and effectively," he added.
The management of virtual and cloud environments is something the tech industry’s biggest companies have been getting involved with recently. Earlier this year Dell acquired Quest Software, while VMware recently announced a raft of updates to its management capabilities.
