Cisco and NetApp join hands for public cloud

Cisco and NetApp has announced an expanded partnership to deliver new converged infrastructure innovation to unify branch office, data center and public cloud infrastructures under the FlexPod architecture.

The partnership expansion includes efforts in technology integration, solution development, and continued go-to-market collaboration - all designed to make it easier for customers to deploy and access next-generation cloud infrastructure solutions.

Deeper integration across computing, networking, storage and orchestration components of FlexPod, combined with broader support for its open ecosystem of partners, will greatly simplify data center deployment and management, deliver greater budget efficiency, reduce risk, and increase agile business responsiveness.

Cisco and NetApp now boast more than 2,100 FlexPod customers across more than 35 countries and over 700 channel partners. Cisco and NetApp are building on this momentum by expanding their successful decade-long partnership to deliver greater innovation.

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.

FlexPod continues to lead on the integration of infrastructure management tools and will support Cisco UCS Manager 2.1, UCS Central and Cisco's recently acquired Cloupia products. In addition, support for Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (Cisco IAC) allows cloud management solutions for FlexPod customers.

Deeper integration across FlexPod at the platform level, as opposed to at the component level, will enable FlexPod to be seamlessly orchestrated by partner solutions, including Microsoft System Center and Citrix CloudPlatform powered by Apache CloudStack.

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.

Padmasree Warrior, chief technology and strategy officer, Cisco said, "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."

Manish Goel, executive vice president, Product Operations, NetApp said, "NetApp and Cisco share a common vision for the future of the data center and will continue to collaborate on innovations that connect organizations under a holistic cloud architecture. Our development, sales, and channel teams will work even closer to deliver new solutions that broaden the market opportunities for both companies and our partners, and help customers gain a competitive advantage from their flexible and efficient agile data center infrastructure."