Cisco announced it is collaborating with VMware to deliver a storage area networks (SANs) designed specifically to help businesses improve the security, scalability and management of storage networks attached to VMware environments. This solution is in line with Cisco’s increasing focus on being a key vendors for companies building next generation data centers. Cisco refers to this as “Data Center 3.0″ which entails the real-time, dynamic orchestration of infrastructure services from shared pools of virtualized server, storage and network resources, while optimizing application performance, service levels, efficiency and collaboration.
Virtual machines allow IT managers to run multiple applications and operating systems on a single physical machine. Virtualizing the data center improves resource use and provides a simpler and more efficient computing model to meet customer needs. The combined solution of Cisco MDS SANs with the VMware platform helps customers to more easily implement storage consolidation, disaster recovery, business continuity and storage backup solutions, as well as improve the visibility, security, and traffic isolation of applications.
The VMware platform increases ROI while enabling the flexibility customers need to build next-generation data centers that are highly elastic, self-managing and self-healing. Cisco MDS SANs can now be virtual machine-optimized, delivering a resilient, high-performance fabric to support large, dense virtual environments by providing consistent policy, visibility, and diagnostics for virtual machines across the data center.
“We have a complex virtual IT environment at Trinity Health, and we look to our key vendors such as VMware and Cisco to collaborate in simplifying and optimizing joint solutions so they work together to our best advantage,” said Mark Trancygier, storage architect, Trinity Health. “Cisco MDS 9000 helps us to scale our virtual machine-attached SAN infrastructure, and this collaboration will help us further our goals to achieve an end-to-end virtualized storage environment.”
Cisco SANs optimized by VMware provide security, mobility, performance monitoring and capacity planning at the virtual machine level, enabling IT managers to better monitor, manage, and scale SAN-attached virtual machines. For example, IT managers can now move, add or change servers without reconfiguring SAN switches or storage arrays, and servers can retain their SAN identity even when moved or replaced in the server chassis.
Cisco and VMware also jointly offer virtualization consulting services to help customers create and deploy server, network and storage virtualization solutions that can reduce cost by provisioning new applications quickly and more safely, while maintaining high levels of application performance.
As VMware and Cisco continue combined their expertise in virtualization and networking to develop solutions this should really help improve IT manager improve efficiency and increase business productivity. Partners can find out more around this solution by going to www.vmware.com/go/alliance_affiliate.
Posted under Data Center Virtualization, Hardware Virtualization, Server Virtualization, Storage Virtualization, Virtualization News, Virtualization Products / Reviews, Virtualization Software
This post was written by admin on November 14, 2008
