Cisco, EMC enhance cloud offering

BANGALORE, INDIA: Cisco and EMC Corporation announced 'three paths to the cloud' – custom-design infrastructure, validated reference architectures, and pre-integrated converged infrastructure.

The companies introduced new joint reference architectures, aligned channel partner incentives, and integrated customer support to speed customers' path to the cloud, says a release.

Rick Snyder, vice president, Global and Strategic Partners, Cisco, said: "Cisco and EMC partner every day in the engineering labs and in the field, helping customers around the world transform their data centers and strengthen their business. Through VCE we've unleashed market-moving innovation through the pre-engineered, pre-integrated Vblock Systems. Now, we're working together to meet customer demand with Cisco Validated Designs for EMC VSPEX and aligned channel incentives to accelerate VSPEX adoption."

The 'three paths to the cloud' include:

Implement a custom-designed infrastructure.

Install validated, reference architectures with Cisco solutions for EMC VSPEX infrastructure.

Purchase a pre-integrated converged infrastructure with VCE Vblock System.

The two new Cisco Validated Designs (CVD) for EMC VSPEX are unified computing reference architectures tailored to SMB and mid-market customers. Designed for private cloud, the CVDs are Cisco Solutions for EMC VSPEX for Microsoft Hyper-V Architectures and Cisco solutions for EMC VSPEX for VMware vSphere 5.0 architectures.

More than 200 Cisco and EMC Velocity channel partners within the global VSPEX community have been trained to resell and deploy EMC VSPEX with Cisco Unified Data Center.

The two have aligned their channel incentive structures to simplify the process of accruing incentives and boost partner profitability. They have also implemented a customer support framework for VSPEX for collaborative case management.

Josh Kahn, vice president, Solutions Marketing, EMC Corporation, said: "VCE enables customers to standardize on a converged infrastructure solution, dramatically accelerating their journey to the cloud. We are very pleased with VCE's momentum and the benefits it is delivering to customers around the world. Building upon this, we are very excited to accelerate our partnership with Cisco on VSPEX to address market requirements for best-of-breed reference architectures offered exclusively via the channel."