IBM and Cisco announced expanded solutions for VersaStack

Cisco and IBM announced new solutions for VersaStack, converged infrastructure jointly developed by the two companies. VersaStack helps organizations reduce complexity and automate processes to accelerate the delivery of applications. The additional technologies incorporated in the announcement today extend VersaStack to include hybrid cloud capabilities and also take advantage of the latest software defined storage technologies to address cloud-scale applications.

This broad set of solutions allows IT organizations to:

- Simplify and standardize service delivery through infrastructure automation: with Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite and VersaStack; improving efficiency while reducing complexity and cost; and delivering a rich set of storage capabilities.

- Deploy premier solutions for hybrid IT: utilizing Cisco CloudCenter and IBM Spectrum Copy Data Management to deploy, provision, and manage applications and data in hybrid cloud environments, with 20+ cloud types and regions, including IBM Bluemix Infrastructure (formerly IBM Softlayer).

- Improve the manageability, recovery and storage of data: Spectrum Software Defined Storage with VersaStack and Cisco UCS help improve efficiency and leverage existing server and storage resources while delivering a rich set of storage capabilities.

- Easy scaling to multi-petabyte storage for fast growing cloud-scale applications: The combination of the Cisco UCS S-Series Storage Servers with IBM Cloud Object Storage delivers an on-premises storage solution for data intensive workloads by supporting IT organizations to help prepare for business requirements with an easily scalable solution.

“Our GIS, engineering, and other applications were slow and underperforming,” said Bill Reed, Chief Technology Officer, Arizona State Land Department. "With our VersaStack solution, we’ve been able to boost system and staff performance and enable mobile access to business-critical data and tools via a hybrid cloud. VersaStack gives us faster, smarter systems that enable us to make better-informed decisions about the State Land Trust much more efficiently for the benefit of all students in the Arizona Public Schools education system, the primary beneficiary of the trust."

"These additions to VersaStack create an environment well suited for both traditional and emerging scale-out applications, addressing our customer needs in a simplified way," said Liz Centoni, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cisco Computing Systems Product Group. "By bringing together Cisco and IBM technologies for hybrid IT we help customers diversify their consumption models and achieve the agility and efficiency digital transformation demands."

"Pressures facing today’s organizations are at the center of our VersaStack collaboration with Cisco," said Ed Walsh, general manager, IBM Storage and Software Defined Infrastructure. "For clients, the expanded VersaStack portfolio delivers extensive IT automation, hybrid cloud versatility for applications and data, support for object storage easily scaling into multi-petabyte configurations, and the ability to cut costs by improving efficiency, manageability, and protection."

Details of this announcement will be discussed by IBM’s Ed Walsh, general manager, IBM Storage and Software Defined Infrastructure, and Cisco’s, Satinder Sethi, vice president, Datacenter Group on Wednesday, March 8 at Cisco Live! Melbourne 2017 during the Innovation Talk: Go Beyond Automation: Advancing Your Next Gen Data Centre.