Cisco, NetApp to enhance Flexpod for cloud

BANGALORE, INDIA: Cisco and NetApp expanded their partnership to deliver new converged infrastructure to unify branch office, data centre and public cloud infrastructures under FlexPod architecture.

The partnership expansion includes efforts in technology integration, solution development, and continued go-to-market collaboration - so as to make it easier for customers to deploy and access cloud infrastructure solutions, says a release.

The companies are forging more integration across Cisco Unified Data Center solutions, NetApp FAS Storage Systems, and FlexPod ecosystem technology partners to create a common foundation for data centres and service providers, from branch office implementations to cloud-scale, multi-data centre deployments.

Cisco and NetApp will also integrate flash technologies at the host and storage levels. 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.

Cisco and NetApp are developing FlexPod solutions capable of handling multi-data-centre 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.

They 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.

ExpressPod includes support for VMware vSphere and will soon include support for Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V.

They are also expanding solution coverage to add more mission-critical applications and private cloud solutions for data centre. 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.