Comstor, a division of Westcon SA, is pleased to announce that South African customers can now immediately benefit from NetApp and Cisco’s decision to expand their partnership and in turn unify branch office, data centre and public cloud infrastructures under the FlexPod architecture.
As per the collaboration between the two vendors, clients of Comstor will be able to purchase technologies that are easy to deploy and that offer an immediate stepping stone to next-generation cloud infrastructure solutions.
The offering provides the perfect solution to fragmented technology and cloud infrastructures, enabling organisations to unify and consolidate these environments for both cost and productivity gains.
“With the focus by Cisco and NetApp to further innovate on the FlexPod infrastructure with the combination of components to establish a unified data centre, our customers will be able to take advantage of a solution that promotes simplified deployment, management and delivery,” states Andrew Hindshaw, data centre practice lead at Comstor.
“According to the companies, this partnership will further enable clients and organisations to connect enterprise clouds to service providers, enterprises to branch offices, consumers to enterprises, and clouds to clouds.”
The agreement sees collaboration between the global technology providers in delivering integration between computing, networking, storage and orchestration components of the FlexPod infrastructure. Additionally the companies are also promising heightened support for Comstor’s partners.
“Our partnership with Cisco is centred around giving our customers solutions that will provide them with a competitive advantage from agile storage that is both flexible and efficient,” states Konstantin Ebert, director of Channels & Alliances EMEA Emerging Markets at NetApp.
“Working with Comstor, we will now be able to even further simplify data centre deployment and management, deliver greater budget efficiency, reduce risk, and increase agile business responsiveness for local customers.”
Technology updates for customers will include:
* Through the partnership, customers will see improved integration across Cisco Unified Data Centre solutions, NetApp FAS Storage Systems, and FlexPod ecosystem technology partners.
With FlexPod’s ability to manage up to 10,000 servers, organisations will also be able to aggregate several FlexPod racks and enable multihop Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCOE). Support will also be provided for Cisco UCS Manager 2.1, UCS Central and Cisco’s recently acquired Cloupia products as well as Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (Cisco IAC).
* Deeper platform integration will enable partner systems such as Microsoft System Centre and Citrix CloudPlatform powered by Apache CloudStack to be run on FlexPod.
* As a solution for cloud service providers, FlexPod will now enable partners to deploy multi-data-centre architectures, through the combination of NetApp clustered Data ONTAP and NetApp FAS storage systems with Cisco UCS servers and Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches, making use of Cisco’s Virtualised Multiservice Data Centre (VMDC) architecture coupled with management solutions from Cisco and ecosystem partners such as BMC Software.
* ExpressPod is ideally suited to branch office environments, and the capabilities of the solution will be extended to meet the compute, network and storage needs of branch offices, and will enable branch locations to take advantage of some of the biggest cost-saving trends in IT, such as virtualisation and cloud computing. It currently supports VMware vSphere and will soon include support for Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V.
* Through the FlexPod Application Validation, the partnership now includes coverage for Oracle Database and applications, SAP BusinessObjects business intelligence and the SAP HANA platform, as well as private cloud offerings such as Microsoft private cloud and Citrix CloudPlatform.
Cisco and NetApp now boast more than 2,100 FlexPod customers across more than 35 countries and over 700 channel partners. The solution is immediately available to South African customers through Comstor, a division of Westcon SA.
As per the collaboration between the two vendors, clients of Comstor will be able to purchase technologies that are easy to deploy and that offer an immediate stepping stone to next-generation cloud infrastructure solutions.
The offering provides the perfect solution to fragmented technology and cloud infrastructures, enabling organisations to unify and consolidate these environments for both cost and productivity gains.
“With the focus by Cisco and NetApp to further innovate on the FlexPod infrastructure with the combination of components to establish a unified data centre, our customers will be able to take advantage of a solution that promotes simplified deployment, management and delivery,” states Andrew Hindshaw, data centre practice lead at Comstor.
“According to the companies, this partnership will further enable clients and organisations to connect enterprise clouds to service providers, enterprises to branch offices, consumers to enterprises, and clouds to clouds.”
The agreement sees collaboration between the global technology providers in delivering integration between computing, networking, storage and orchestration components of the FlexPod infrastructure. Additionally the companies are also promising heightened support for Comstor’s partners.
“Our partnership with Cisco is centred around giving our customers solutions that will provide them with a competitive advantage from agile storage that is both flexible and efficient,” states Konstantin Ebert, director of Channels & Alliances EMEA Emerging Markets at NetApp.
“Working with Comstor, we will now be able to even further simplify data centre deployment and management, deliver greater budget efficiency, reduce risk, and increase agile business responsiveness for local customers.”
Technology updates for customers will include:
* Through the partnership, customers will see improved integration across Cisco Unified Data Centre solutions, NetApp FAS Storage Systems, and FlexPod ecosystem technology partners.
With FlexPod’s ability to manage up to 10,000 servers, organisations will also be able to aggregate several FlexPod racks and enable multihop Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCOE). Support will also be provided for Cisco UCS Manager 2.1, UCS Central and Cisco’s recently acquired Cloupia products as well as Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (Cisco IAC).
* Deeper platform integration will enable partner systems such as Microsoft System Centre and Citrix CloudPlatform powered by Apache CloudStack to be run on FlexPod.
* As a solution for cloud service providers, FlexPod will now enable partners to deploy multi-data-centre architectures, through the combination of NetApp clustered Data ONTAP and NetApp FAS storage systems with Cisco UCS servers and Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches, making use of Cisco’s Virtualised Multiservice Data Centre (VMDC) architecture coupled with management solutions from Cisco and ecosystem partners such as BMC Software.
* ExpressPod is ideally suited to branch office environments, and the capabilities of the solution will be extended to meet the compute, network and storage needs of branch offices, and will enable branch locations to take advantage of some of the biggest cost-saving trends in IT, such as virtualisation and cloud computing. It currently supports VMware vSphere and will soon include support for Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V.
* Through the FlexPod Application Validation, the partnership now includes coverage for Oracle Database and applications, SAP BusinessObjects business intelligence and the SAP HANA platform, as well as private cloud offerings such as Microsoft private cloud and Citrix CloudPlatform.
Cisco and NetApp now boast more than 2,100 FlexPod customers across more than 35 countries and over 700 channel partners. The solution is immediately available to South African customers through Comstor, a division of Westcon SA.
