Cisco is spending $125 million in cash and retention-based incentives to buy Cloupia, a three-year-old start-up that automates cloud-building.

It lets enterprises and service providers deploy and configure physical and virtual resources from a single management console.

Cloupia's infrastructure management software is supposed to enhance Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS) and Nexus switching portfolio with a single pane-of-glass view into the automation of compute, network, storage, virtual machine and operating system resources.

Cisco says that when Cloupia's widgetry is combined with data center management solutions like its UCS Manager, Cloupia lets users seamlessly manage pools of computing power, network services, storage and virtual machines as a unified whole and deploy IT services more quickly and cheaply.

Cloupia's Unified Infrastructure Controller (CUIC) enables organizations to build their own internal private clouds as well as manage public clouds.

It's vendor-neutral and supports multi-hypervisor and multi-cloud provisioning, management and monitoring, It's supposed to improve service levels and operational efficiencies by providing service-centric IT management with end-to-end automation capabilities.

Cloupia also has a data center management tool for the iPad called Cloud Genie.

The acquisition should close this quarter and then Clopia's 50 odd people will join Cisco's Data Center Group. Cloupia has maybe 30 customers and partnerships with VMware, Amazon, Rackspace and Microsoft.