Cisco and NetApp announced on Thursday an expanded partnership to deliver new converged infrastructure innovation to unify branch office, data center and public cloud infrastructures under the FlexPod architecture. Current IT architectures comprise a fragmented combination of infrastructure along with public, private and hybrid clouds offered by different organizations and addressing distinct customer needs.
The partnership expansion makes Cisco and NetApp able to offer the ability to simplify deployment, management and orchestration — connecting enterprise clouds to service providers, enterprises to branch offices, consumers to enterprises, and clouds to clouds.
“The past 10 years of partnering with NetApp have proven to be successful in bringing a Cisco validated, FlexPod architecture to our customers,” Padmasree Warrior, chief technology and strategy officer, Cisco said in a statement. “Building on that success, we’re now expanding our partnership to deliver deeper technology integration and broader solution development across the unified data center for an open, scalable, Multicloud infrastructure. Together we can help our customers use their current data center investment to address the challenges of a mobile-cloud era.”
The two companies promise to deliver greater innovation, including:
- Deeper FlexPod Architecture Integration: Cisco and NetApp are forging deeper integration across CiscoUnified Data Center solutions, NetApp FAS Storage Systems, and FlexPod ecosystem technology partners to create a common foundation for data centers and service providers, from branch office implementations to cloud-scale, multi-data center deployments. FlexPod solutions will provide the ability to manage up to 10,000 servers, allowing organizations to aggregate several FlexPod racks and enable multihop Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCOE). These solutions, tuned for service providers and distributed enterprises, enable infrastructures to be scaled with predictive performance and support.
- Intergration of Flash Technologies: Cisco and NetApp will also integrate Flash technologies at the host and storage levels, to accelerate performance across all areas of the converged infrastructure. At the server level, applications running on Flash-optimized Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS) servers can be further accelerated with NetApp Flash Accel, while at the controller and array levels, technologies such as NetApp Flash Cache and Flash Pools can be used to access cached data faster.
- FlexPod for Cloud Service Providers: To accelerate momentum in the service provider market Cisco and NetApp are developing flexible, massively scalable FlexPod solutions capable of handling multi-data-center service provider architectures. These solutions will use Cisco’s Virtualized Multiservice Data Center (VMDC) architecture and will include management and orchestration solutions from Cisco and from ecosystem partners such as BMC Software and, in the future, from open source providers.
- Branch Office Solution: Cisco and NetApp are partnering to extend the capabilities of ExpressPod to meet the compute, network and storage needs of branch offices. ExpressPod shares a similar converged infrastructure approach as FlexPod, and as a result, it is ideally suited to branch office deployments with an easy upgrade path to FlexPod as the needs of the branch grow. This easy-to-deploy architecture can be configured to offer greater interoperability with the core organizational data center, enabling branch locations to take advantage of some of the biggest cost-saving trends in IT, such as virtualization and cloud computing.
- FlexPod Application Validation: Cisco and NetApp are expanding solution coverage to add more mission-critical applications and private cloud solutions for the datacenter. Mission critical solutions include Oracle Database and applications, SAP® BusinessObjects™ business intelligence and the SAP HANA® platform, and private cloud offerings include Microsoft private cloud and Citrix CloudPlatform.
About Cisco
Cisco is one of the leading brands in IT that helps companies seize the opportunities of tomorrow by proving that amazing things can happen when you connect the previously unconnected. For ongoing news, please go to www.thenetwork.cisco.com.
About NetApp
NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions that deliver outstanding cost efficiency and accelerate business breakthroughs. For more information, visit: www.netapp.com.
