Cisco recently announced a range of new joint technologies and integrated solutions for data centres that utilise Microsoft Cloud technologies. It combines Cisco Unified Data Center architecture with Microsoft Fast Track architecture solutions to help reduce complexity, improve IT productivity and enhance business agility.
Architecture
The Cisco Unified Data centre architecture platform combines compute, storage, network and management into a platform designed to automate IT as a service across physical and virtual environments, resulting in increased budget efficiency, more agile business responsiveness, and simplified IT operations.
Combined with Microsoft Fast Track it delivers a pre-configured solution that will help channel partners who resell both Cisco and Microsoft technologies to grow their data center business. These:
- Lessen the complexity of the data centre
- Help to enable simplified deployment, operations and increase productivity
The technology
The technology combines the Cisco Nexus 1000V series, Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Extensible Switch and System Centre Virtual Machine Manager 2012 to allow the virtualisation of certain aspects of data center networks alongside physical networking and cloud computing infrastructure.
While the VSPEX Solution for Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track 3.0 offers a simple, fully integrated, rapidly deployable Microsoft-based private cloud upon which customers can easily manage the applications that run their businesses.
Finally, FlexPod with Microsoft Private Cloud offers a turnkey platform, designed jointly by NetApp and Cisco, and built on a defined set of hardware and software for IaaS environments based on Microsoft platforms.
The solution features management, automation and orchestration capabilities integrated with Microsoft System Center 2012 SP1 and PowerShell for the efficient and accelerated deployment of services and applications.