Cisco and IBM speed digital and cloud transformation

Converged infrastructure deployments have become a critical foundation of cloud and traditional data centers. Market surveys conducted by leading industry analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) show 56 percent of enterprises plan to deploy converged infrastructure, while 32 percent already have.¹ At the same time, more than 80 percent of enterprises will commit to hybrid cloud architectures by the end of 2017.²

The direction of IT in the 21^st century is clear. IBM recognized these trends years ago and we’ve been aggressively developing offerings that address the strong market demand for converged infrastructure and hybrid cloud solutions across the full range of applications, workloads, use cases and enterprise types. Now we’ve taken an industry-leading next step and combined the best of both technology worlds into one powerful new solution: VersaStack for Hybrid Cloud.

Jointly developed by IBM and Cisco, VersaStack brings together market-leading IBM software defined storage with Cisco UCS integrated infrastructure. In particular, the new VersaStack for Hybrid Cloud solution combines Cisco ONE ECS Cloud Management and IBM Spectrum Copy Data Management technologies to create a single converged infrastructure and hybrid cloud platform that enables orchestration, deployment, management and migration of applications across data center, public cloud and private cloud environments.

For IBM Business Partners, VersaStack for Hybrid Cloud provides your customers and prospects an industry-leading solution for many modern IT use cases, such as:

• Moving applications and data to the cloud
• Choosing the best deployment options for a wide variety of enterprise IT workloads
• Improving business agility by deploying applications now, and then moving them later to their most optimal environments
• Tracking and managing copies for end-to-end data management
• Freeing up resources in the data center for new-generation applications and cognitive workloads

 Lief Morin, CEO of IBM Business Partner Key Information Systems, notes on the new VersaStack offering:

“Converged infrastructure is vital to mission-critical infrastructures. It’s also clear that the future belongs to hybrid cloud. Our customers are very interested in the benefits and advantages offered by VersaStack converged infrastructure solutions from IBM and Cisco. Adding cloud connectivity and management features will make VersaStack an even more powerful solution for all the industry verticals we sell into.”

VersaStack for Hybrid Cloud incorporates IBM Spectrum Copy Data Management, which catalogs copy data from across local, hybrid cloud and off-site cloud infrastructures; identifies duplicates; and compares copy requests to existing copies, ensuring the minimum number of copies are created to service business needs. The solution also leverages the capabilities of IBM’s award-winning Spectrum Virtualize—most notably the Transparent Cloud Tiering feature that extends local storage into the cloud for snapshots and restores, helping transform the economics of storage by allowing the use of cloud resources as alternatives to on-premises storage.

Along with all of the other industry-leading Cisco components, VersaStack for Hybrid Cloud uses Cisco ONE ECS Cloud Management, an application-centric hybrid cloud management platform that makes it easy to deploy and manage data center, private cloud and public cloud application solutions.

The real strength of this new offering is that it truly brings together the best from two worlds. Your customers get a well-tested, low-risk solution from two of the world’s largest and most trusted vendors. Two of the hottest market trends are brought together into one business opportunity. Two innovative new technologies—IBM Spectrum Copy Data Management and Cisco One ECS Cloud Management—power the solution. And best of all, your customers and prospects get it all through only one source—IBM Business Partners.

Learn more about VersaStack for Hybrid Cloud and check out the press release. It’s an offering that demonstrates the clear value of partnering with IBM.