IBM and Cisco Systems have combined their formidable forces to create a set of new industry solutions for VersaStack, their jointly-developed converged data center infrastructure package.
The expanded offerings will enable clients to build their own hybrid cloud solutions, migrate applications and data between on-premises and cloud resources and enable end-to-end data management.
Ostensibly, this is all aimed at lowering total cost of ownership and to accelerate the return on investment of an enterprise's infrastructure.
The announcement was made March 6 at the CiscoLive conference in Melbourne. The two IT heavyweights started this partnership in 2014.
Further reading
Manages, Scales Storage Resources in Software-Defined Manner
The ability to quickly deploy applications and the data they use in a flexible manner is essential to delivering value to users. Important to this process is a facility that can manage and scale data storage resources with software defined technologies; this is what the IBM-Cisco joint development is all about.
The VersaStack portfolio includes the following new solutions:
--Infrastructure automation to accelerate the delivery of IT applications: This simplifies and standardizes service delivery through infrastructure automation with Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite and VersaStack; it improves efficiency, reduces complexity and delivers a rich set of storage capabilities, Cisco said.
--Hybrid cloud-ready infrastructure with VersaStack: This is a premier solution for hybrid IT to deploy, provision and manage applications and data in hybrid cloud environments. Features more than 20 cloud types and regions, including IBM Bluemix Infrastructure.
--Object storage support with IBM's Cloud Object Storage on Cisco's UCS S3260: This delivers a hybrid cloud or on-premises storage solution for data-intensive workloads by enabling IT organizations to meet compliance, data sovereignty and other business requirements. Cisco claims that this a scalable solution that solves petabyte and beyond storage challenges.
--Spectrum software-defined storage with VersaStack and Cisco UCS: This improves the manageability, protection and storage of data. Cisco UCS with IBM Spectrum products help improve efficiency by using existing server and storage server resources while delivering a rich set of storage capabilities.
With these new capabilities, VersaStack shifts the emphasis for IT organizations from managing their IT infrastructure to engaging in real-time insights so they can adapt to the latest business initiatives, reduce cost or invest in new projects.
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