Microsoft and Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure, hello cloud!
The following post is from Satya Nadella, Executive Vice President, Cloud and Enterprise, Microsoft.
On Wednesday at Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) event in New York, I joined Cisco CEO John Chambers to announce an expanded partnership between our two companies.
Microsoft and Cisco have a long history of collaborating to help customers address business and technology challenges. Together, we helped customers embrace IP-based client server computing and, most recently, with our pre-validated solutions, we’ve helped customers like ING Direct, nGenx, and the City of Barcelona embrace the private cloud.
The pace of change in our industry continues to accelerate and customers are facing new challenges, including the growth of Internet-connected devices and the explosion of the applications and data that light those devices up. This growth is straining today’s infrastructure as IT struggles to keep up with the demands of new applications. All of this leads to increased complexity and rising costs.
The solution? Next-generation infrastructure that transforms compute, network and storage – also known as cloud computing.
As enterprise IT increasingly turns to the cloud to address these challenges, they will choose providers that put applications and workloads front and center, integrate with a broad ecosystem of industry players, support industry standards and deliver flexibility via hybrid clouds. This is the approach we are taking with our Cloud OS and our expanded partnership with Cisco.
Through this expanded partnership, we will bring together Microsoft’s Cloud OS and Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure to deliver new integrated solutions that help customers take the next step on their cloud computing journey. These new solutions are designed to improve business agility and reduce cost by driving infrastructure automation in support of core business processes and applications. This next-generation infrastructure will deliver increased application performance, resource pooling, visibility, automation and mobility through:
· Converged ACI stacks that include fully integrated versions of Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V, System Center 2012 R2, SQL Server, Exchange and SharePoint
· Optimized application and workload performance through dynamic network policies that automate and simplify deployment
· Comprehensive management, infrastructure programmability and deep visibility and automation across Cisco UCS/ACI, System Center and Windows Server 2012 R2 virtual and non-virtual environments
· Complete support for workload mobility using gateway solutions delivered by both companies – delivering on the promise of hybrid clouds
Customers can begin their cloud computing journey today with pre-validated Cisco UCS, Windows Server and System Center 2012 R2 solutions - and they can extend those investments as new capabilities become available. Our channel of partners are ready to help.
You can learn more about the announcements made at Cisco’s Application Infrastructure launch here and Microsoft’s Cloud OS here.
Together, we’ve helped enterprises navigate a number of historic industry transformations, and together, we will continue to support these customers as they move to the cloud.