Networking giant Cisco and long-time partner NetApp have expanded their decade-long partnership in an effort to develop a converged stack for modern workloads, namely cloud and Big Data. Cisco chief technology and strategy officer Padmasree Warrior went over the news with NetApp EVP of product operations Manish Goel in a newly released promo video (see full video below).

Warrior says that the market is transitioning faster than Cisco expected. Data center architectures are becoming more complicated, and organizations are turning to vendors for solutions that can address their new business needs effectively and with minimum hassle. Enterprises want their workloads to be data driven rather than the other way around.

Warrior reveals Cisco and NetApp are tackling this issue with four new initiatives:

• A joint project that focuses on adding more ‘integration’ to FlexPod, their flagship converged infrastructure reference architecture
• The development of a massively scalable FlexPod appliance for cloud service providers
• The roll out of an ExpressPod solution for remote branch offices
• A FlexPod application validation program

Goel reflects that FlexPod has gained a tremendous amount of traction since its debut two years ago. The platform is distributed by some 700 partners and used by over 2,100 customers in more than 35 countries. He credits the product’s success to Cisco and NetApp’s common technology vision, culture and channel approach.

The executive highlights that FlexPod is unique in that it delivers both innovation and integration: this combination makes it optimal for large-scale environments that span branch offices, corporate data centers and the public cloud. He concludes by stressing that simplified deployment, orchestration and management across these different layers will become increasingly important for enterprise IT.

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