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.
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.