When infrastructure as a service provider Outscale Inc. unveiled its TINA On-Premise technology in 2016, the company made it clear that it intended to compete with major cloud providers. But in doing so, the French company decided it would also compete through an alliance with two major U.S. firms, becoming the first Cisco Systems Inc. Unified Computing System customer in France and the second for NetApp Inc.

That partnership leveraged FlexPod, next-generation converged infrastructure jointly developed by Cisco Systems and NetApp. The result has been an orchestration technology in TINA that sets up private cloud to access public services.

“For the past five years, we’ve been developing our own orchestration layer that allows us to use the whole FlexPod architecture to provide infrastructure as a service for our customers,” said Benjamin Laplane (pictured, right), EMEA chief sales and solutions officer at Outscale. “It’s a private cloud solution ready to be deployed whenever you need to.”

Laplane visited the set of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Cisco Live event in Barcelona, Spain, and spoke with host John Furrier (@furrier). He was joined by Alfred Manhart (pictured, left), senior director of channel and system integrators, EMEA, at NetApp, and they discussed the two companies’ partnership on cloud technology deployment and the importance of continuing to move up the stack. (* Disclosure below.)

First French company to be NetApp certified

Two years ago, Outscale became the first French cloud provider certified by NetApp AltaVault. It received similar certification from Cisco’ Cloud and Managed Services Program for enterprise-class reliability, security and support.

Security and reliability are two critical aspects for Outscale’s cloud-based customers. “When you see the architecture that we’ve deployed, everything is redundant,” Laplane said. “It’s not fail-safe; it’s failure-proof, which is even better.”

The alliance with Outscale and Cisco is a continuation of NetApp’s own strategic direction. Recent announcements adding Microsoft Azure capabilities to NetApp’s Data Fabric technology exemplify the company’s interest in extending its influence in both on-prem and public cloud worlds.

The pairing of NetApp with Cisco on the Outscale platform underscores the importance of this strategy. “We’re working with Cisco on validated designs, going up the stack,” Manhart said. “If you’re not going up the stack regarding different workloads, going off to the internet of things, going off to the analytics or application layer, we will fail.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Cisco Live Barcelona 2018. (* Disclosure: NetApp Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither NetApp nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE