Building on a decade-long partnership, Cisco and EMC announced an extension of their cloud partnership at this year's VMworld conference in San Francisco.
The companies aim to enrich the 'menu' of cloud infrastructure solutions available to their shared enterprise and service provider customers through updates to Cisco and EMC's "three paths to the cloud” strategy, a release stated.
At the conference, Cisco and EMC introduced new joint reference architectures, aligned their collaborative channel partner incentives, and announced plans for integrated customer support to help “speed customers' path to the cloud.”
The "three paths to the cloud" strategy enables customers to implement a custom-designed infrastructure with “best-of-breed” products, the ability to install validated, easy-to-deploy reference architectures with Cisco solutions for EMC VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, and the capacity to purchase a pre-integrated converged infrastructure with VCE Vblock System, according to a release.
"Cisco and EMC partner every day in the engineering labs and in the field, helping customers around the world transform their data centres and strengthen their business,” Rick Snyder, Cisco's VP of Global and Strategic Partners, said in a release. “Through VCE we've unleashed market-moving innovation through the pre-engineered, pre-integrated Vblock Systems. Now, we're working together to meet customer demand with Cisco validated designs for EMC VSPEX and aligned channel incentives to accelerate VSPEX adoption."
Two new Cisco validated designs for EMC VSPEX are now available in support of EMC VSPEX for Microsoft Hyper-V architectures and for EMC VSPEX for VMware vSphere 5.0 architectures.
These unified computing reference architectures are tailored to SMB and mid-market customers and more than 200 global Cisco and EMC Velocity channel partners have been trained to resell and deploy the solutions.
