Market leaders Cisco and IBM have been global strategic partners—a synergistic relationship that has ultimately benefited our mutual customers—for more than 20 years. Nowhere is this truer than in our VersaStack solution, a comprehensive set of converged infrastructure and software-defined technologies that help organizations accelerate their digital transformations.
Public cloud-based services can dramatically accelerate customer digital transformation initiatives. However, using them exclusively can be difficult and costly, and a complete transition can take a significant amount of time. In some cases, it’s simply not possible to run applications 100 percent on public cloud infrastructure, given regulations or other constraints related to data sensitivity, privacy, and security. The result? Many applications today are deployed either in hybrid/multicloud architectures or completed on premises.
In parallel, many of today’s applications are built with Docker containers, orchestrated and managed by Kubernetes. These technologies help developers build once and deploy anywhere, freeing them to create and launch applications into production with speed and agility. This capability is particularly important, because digital transformation initiatives are often driven by competitive and social environmental considerations, which leave little room for error when making decisions about infrastructure and related services.
VersaStack: a history of proven success
Cisco and IBM are not new to working together to meet IT requirements. In fact, IBM and Cisco have a 15-year history of demonstrated success on the jointly developed solutions with more than 25,000 shared customers as proof points. Over the years, Cisco and IBM have repeatedly demonstrated their ability to use the latest technologies to deliver innovative and validated converged solutions that meet customer requirements and reduce risk. VersaStack is the ultimate evolution of this partnership and validated methodology.
The new Cisco VersaStack validated design solution
With all this as background, I’m pleased to share that Cisco and IBM have partnered to produce the latest Cisco Validated Design (CVD) for the VersaStack user-provisioned infrastructure for the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform solution. This solution combines the advantages of Cisco UCS servers with IBM’s industry-leading software- defined FlashSystem family storage arrays and IBM Spectrum Virtualize software, as integrated technologies with Cisco CVD validation. This VersaStack solution gives our clients the flexibility to acquire, maintain, and renew technology in ways that align with their business strategies and keep budgets predictable.
This CVD supports all products in the IBM FlashSystem family, delivering both hybrid and all-flash options and running on IBM Spectrum Virtualize software, a common data management software layer enabling hybrid and multicloud deployments. FlashSystem family products are all non-volatile memory express (NVMe)-enabled, with performance and scalability that meets the needs of entry-level, midrange, and high-end enterprise clients.
In addition, IBM FlashSystem storage is enabled for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform deployments through container storage interface (CSI) plug-ins. Red Hat OpenShift is an enterprise-ready Kubernetes container platform with full-stack automated operations to manage hybrid cloud and multicloud deployments. Red Hat OpenShift includes everything needed for hybrid cloud, enterprise container, and Kubernetes development and deployments. It includes an enterprise-grade Linux operating system as well as container runtime, networking, monitoring, container registry, authentication, and authorization solutions.
In short, this latest-generation VersaStack solution from IBM and Cisco provides a trusted, highly available, scalable platform and flexible architecture that supports a variety of deployment models to meet IT’s needs in modernizing data centers.
For more information,
- Read the Design and Deployment Guide for the new VersaStack solution.
- Visit the IBM VersaStack
- To learn more about how Cisco and IBM are working together, visit cisco.com/go/ibm
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