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.
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. Through a shared vision of a unified data center, Cisco and NetApp 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.
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 have 2,100 FlexPod customers across more than 35 countries and over 700 channel partners. 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.
Cisco and NetApp will also integrate flash technologies at the host and storage levels, to accelerate performance across all areas of the converged infrastructure. Padmasree Warrior, chief technology and strategy officer, Cisco said, “The past 10 years of partnering with NetApp have proven to be successful in bringing a Cisco validated, FlexPod architecture to our customers. 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.”
Manish Goel, executive vice president, Product Operations, NetApp opined “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.”