Cisco, Microsoft Team Up on Data Center Offerings

Datamation content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More .

Cisco and Microsoft have announced that they will be working together on a series of new products targeted at enterprise data centers. The first few products will combine Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) technology with Microsoft’s cloud computing technologies.

Jeffrey Burt from eWeek reported, “Cisco Systems is working with Microsoft to offer new products designed to make it easier for businesses to virtualize their data centers, reduce complexity and leverage cloud computing technologies. Cisco is combining its Unified Computing System (UCS) converged data center solution with Microsoft’s Fast Track 3.0 architecture offerings to give businesses integrated solutions that will make it easier for them to provision, deploy and manage their data center environments, according to the two companies. In addition, Cisco is offering new Microsoft Fast Track 3.0 packages that can leverage options from either EMC and its year-old VSPEX integrated virtualization solution or NetApp and its FlexPod technology.”

ZDNet’s Rachel King noted, “The tech giants tout that the merger of these architectures should streamline the management of combined Cisco and Microsoft data center environments while improving agility to provision resources. Microsoft customers, in particular, will also gain access to Cisco’s Unified Computing System of servers, which combine networking, virtualization, and storage access into a single architecture.”

The Datacenter Journal’s Rakesh Dogra added, “Cisco has ported its Nexus 1000V virtual switch to run on top of the Hyper-V server virtualization hypervisor from Microsoft. Cisco has been keeping a close watch on the growth of Hyper-V adoption rates especially on its UCS B-Series blade and C-Series rack servers. The Nexus 1000V support for Hyper V 3.0 will come about in a short while from now.”

ServerWatch quoted Cisco’s Siva Sivakumar who said, “The early ramp-up of UCS was primarily centered around work we had done with VMware. With Server 2012, obviously Microsoft has put out a platform that is a lot more data-center ready, and we are clearly seeing customer demand for it.”