Cisco and IBM are teaming up to offer integrated server solutions that combine Cisco’s UCS technology with IBM’s Storwize storage system. The VersaStack deal is Cisco’s first big integrated infrastructure announcement since its divestment from VCE in October.
Cisco’s contribution to the stack is its unified computing system (UCS), Nexus fabric extenders paired with MDS switches, and UCS Director software. Those will be combined with IBM’s Storwize V7000 technology, which brings built-in data virtualisation and intelligent tiering capabilities to the stack.
The companies said the initial VersaStack solution will target datacentre and private cloud deployments as well as big data and analytics for large commercial and enterprise customers, but additional reference architectures and use cases will be added over time.
“Organisations today require IT infrastructure to be easy, efficient, and versatile,” said Satinder Sethi, vice president, datacentre solutions, Cisco. “VersaStack will help our mutual customers streamline deployment and operation of their IT infrastructure. It will also provide a foundation for innovation between Cisco and IBM—from mobility and data analytics to Intercloud and application centric infrastructure.”
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Laura Guio, vice president, business line executive storage systems, IBM said that as cloud becomes more popular businesses are increasingly on the lookout for tightly integrated stacks that bring more flexibility in storage and networking capabilities.
“For its part, IBM Storwize is designed to help clients ease management and improve datacentre performance through virtualisation and the automatic movement of data to the most strategic storage tier,” Guio said.
Neither Cisco nor IBM commented on whether the two would set up a dedicated salesforce to market the converged solution, but they said VersaStack would be sold through “qualified business partners” experienced with Cisco and IBM technologies.
The deal comes just over a month after most of Cisco’s share in VCE, the converged infrastructure company jointly created by EMC, Cisco, Intel and VMware, was acquired by EMC. As BCN reported at the time, Cisco, cutting its stake in VCE meant the company could focus on pushing UCS and Nexus-based converged systems of its own, partly as a way of compensating for the fall in physical networking revenue, and (likely) to compete directly with Vblock.
With both IBM (which is bringing its storage IP) and Cisco hinting at future VersaStack deployments, that strategy seems to be coming to fruition.
Date: December 8, 2014