Another feature is Virtual Data Centers, designed for self-service provisioning and management of multiple virtual data centers -- not just virtual machines. These data centers span virtual and physical compute, through UCS Manager, and networking resources, and can be provisioned according to infrastructure consumption limits.

Version 3.1 also includes Network Services Manager, which lets customers order network resources -- like VLANs -- from a self-service portal. Cisco says NSM provides the foundation for network-as-a-service in future releases of IAC.

Version 3.1 of IAC is consistent with Cisco's intent to manage multiple cloud environments such as OpenStack, Amazon EC2 and .

in Network World's Data Center section.