Cisco and NetApp Expand Partnership

Cisco Systems,
Inc. and NetApp, Inc. 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 simplify data center
deployment and management, deliver greater budget efficiency, reduce risk, and
increase agile business responsiveness.

The two companies 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, including:

Deeper
FlexPod Architecture Integration

• Cisco and NetApp
  are forging deeper integration across Cisco Unified 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 FCOE. These solutions, tuned for service
  providers and distributed enterprises, enable infrastructures to be scaled with
  predictive performance and support.
• FlexPod 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 orchestrated by partner
  solutions, including Microsoft System Center and Citrix CloudPlatform powered
  by Apache CloudStack.
• The two firms 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 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. The set of solutions will
bring together NetApp Clustered ONTAP and NetApp FAS storage systems with Cisco
UCS servers and Cisco Nexus 7000 Series switches to create dynamically
provisioned pools of server, storage and network resources that can be scaled
up and scaled down by service providers depending on application requirements.
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 suited to branch office deployments with an upgrade path to
FlexPod as the needs of the branch grow. This 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.
ExpressPod includes support for VMware vSphere and will soon include support
for Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V.

FlexPod Application Validation
The two partners 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.

Padmasree Warrior, CTO
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, EVP, 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."

Simon Aspinall, chief of global markets,
Virtustream, Inc., said: "With the FlexPod
solution from Cisco and NetApp, we can deploy private and public cloud
solutions tailored to our enterprise customers’ individual requirements for
mission-critical applications. The ability with FlexPod to dynamically integrate
compute, memory, network and storage is unique in the market, giving our cloud
and IaaS solutions a clear advantage."