Hitachi Vantara this week announced it had extended its alliance with Cisco to include networks attached to the converged infrastructure platforms from Cisco incorporated in the Hitachi Vantara server lineup.
The extension of the alliance is a direct request from partners that build a solution based on Hitachi storage systems attached to Cisco servers and networks, says Mike Walkey, senior vice president for the global partner organization at Hitachi Vantara.
Now rather than having to build their own reference architectures for those solutions on their own, Hitachi Vantara and Cisco will collaborate more on creating more comprehensive reference architectures address everything from horizontal use cases focused on, for example, analytics to vertical industries such as banking, says Walkey.
One of the first examples of that effort is a Cisco and Hitachi Adaptive Solutions for Converged Infrastructure offering is now a Cisco Validated Design (CVD). That offering will be the primary offering Hitachi Ventara provides for general-purpose computing and will be supported now jointly by both Hitachi Vantara and Cisco, says Walkey.
The extension of the existing 15-year alliance between the two companies to include networking has been a long time in coming, acknowledges Walkey.
“This is something our joint partners have been asking for quite some time,” says Walkey.
The overlap between Hitachi partners that are also Cisco networking partners is considerable, so this latest effort significantly reduces friction for those partners, adds Walkey.
Hitachi Vantara, of course, is not the only storage partner Cisco has. But Hitachi Vantara continues to have a significant presence among higher-end enterprise IT organizations.
It’s unclear to what degree this extended alliance will help partners reduce their total costs for delivering solutions. But at a time when partners that specialize in building solutions that get deployed inside a data center are competing for every application workload against not just traditional rivals but also cloud service providers every little bit of extra help matters.
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