Cisco, NetApp, VMware announce new design architecture, collaborative support

VMware’s Paul Harapin

NetApp, Cisco, VMware have announced an agreement to address several inhibitors to organisations fully virtualising their infrastructure.

Under the agreement, the three companies will introduce a secure multi-tenancy design architecture and a collaborative support model aimed at helping address barriers associated with moving toward 100 per cent virtualisation.

The architecture would offer IT managers and chief information officers with an end-to-end, validated design architecture capable of isolating clients, business units, departments or security zones for improved security across the computing, networking, storage and management layers of a unified infrastructure, according to the companies.

Area vice president at VMware ANZ, Paul Harapin, said the failure to move toward full virtualisation among several Australian organisations came down to issues around processes and architecture.

“Over the last few years businesses have said, ‘virtualisation is great, there’s huge benefits, let’s get into it,’ but there hasn’t been a lot of architectural thought around what they are trying to achieve,” he said.

“With the move to virtualisation, customers also need to look at all their processes around provisioning, technology, applications, de-provisioning, performance, patching, back-up — the whole lot. Most things change [with virtualisation] and with work around the process part we will see greater adoption kick through and move to 100 per cent rather than get stuck at 50 or 60 per cent.”

Cisco ANZ CTO, Kevin Bloch, agrees. Having the correct architecture design, he said, is essential to address issues of scale associated with 100 per cent virtualisation.

“When you have a lot of virtual machines and you want to move them from one cluster to another or from one data centre to another, the network people lose visibility of the virtual machine and the application and the configuration — therefore they have lost control,” he said.

“Because of that, a lot of IT shops were reticent to scale virtualisation because the total cost of ownership when they hit a particular threshold went through the roof.”

On the support front, Bloch said Cisco have set up an environment at its Sydney technical assistance centre (TAC) that reflected the new validated design architecture. NetApp ANZ area vice president, Peter O’Connor, said it had set up Cisco, VMware and its own kit, based on the new design architecture, at its Melbourne office.

The three companies have also designed and implemented a Cisco-validated design guide, which outlines how to deploy and configure a secure multi-tencancy architecture in customer data centres.

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