Cisco plans acquisition to speed up, expand services
Data centers are constantly looking for ways to simplify application deployments and grow in the cloud. In an attempt to drive virtualization and automation, Cisco has announced its intent to acquire Embrane, a lifecycle management platform for application-centric network services such as firewalls/VPNs and load balancers.
“The unique skill set and talent of the Embrane team will allow us to move more quickly to meet customer demands,” Cisco said in a blog post about the acquisition. “Together with Cisco’s engineering expertise, the Embrane team will help to expand our strategy of offering freedom of choice to our customers through the Nexus product portfolio and enhance the capabilities of application centric infrastructure.”
The acquisition allows Cisco to leverage Embrane’s Heleos platform, which includes the Embrane heleos ESM, as well as Embrane’s firewalls, client and site-to-site IPsec VPNs, and server load balancers with SSL offload designed to improve performance, increase security and add more capabilities for automation by creating application-centric networking solutions.
“The Cisco-Embrane solution delivers superior capability in provisioning network connectivity and required network services between related application workloads regardless of where they exist in the network,” Embrane said.
Cisco’s APIC and Embrane’s Heleos are set to work together in an integrated model with bidirectional communication so both systems are aware of each other to “automate and manage the appliance licensing, assignment of management addresses and resource provisioning,” according to Embrane’s blogpost on the subject.
The Embrane team will become a part of Cisco’s Insieme Business Unit with the acquisition expected to be complete before the end of the current quarter. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
