This week, at the Cisco Networkers event in Barcelona, we announced our OEM expanded partnership with Cisco.
Instead of boring you with the details of the agreement and bombarding you with acronyms like LAN, SAN, FCoE and iSCSI – let me cut to the chase.
Why does this matter?
IT needs to be more closely coordinated than ever before. With IT efficiency tied so closely to business performance, the server, storage and networking folks can no longer operate in silos – they are one team with a common goal of meeting the ever-changing needs of their internal and external customers. By offering additional Cisco solutions that complement Dell server and storage solutions, businesses have a fully coordinated network fabric to gracefully adapt to changing business and application needs.
Businesses need maximum value for every IT dollar spent. Dell offers the most value for your IT dollar – hands down. Dell will continue to deliver tremendous value to businesses looking to unify their virtualized server and storage environments with this expanded Cisco relationship. We are not only reducing CAPEX with the combined solution, but also reducing OPEX by cutting management costs.
Complexity is the last thing that our customers need. Dell works within our customers existing environments rather than force additional management tools, training, integration into security teams, and support/service processes. The Cisco switches are easily integrated into our customers’ environments. By continuously talking to our customers, we know many of our customers already use Cisco equipment and their associated management tools. By partnering with Cisco, we allow you to use your existing network management tools.
Options matter. Dell is an open standards and non-proprietary based data center solution provider. So, we are committed to helping our customers simplify IT by providing great data center products and solutions, including networking switches from leading vendors. Partnerships mean more options for Dell to build IT environments that meet customers’ individual needs. Along with these options comes the flexibility to deploy various protocols across a single, unified, data center fabric – Ethernet.
Single Server Adapter. Virtualized server environments can often have mixed I/O, such as Ethernet, Fibre Channel and Infiniband (translation: a lot of server adapters). The new Cisco switches can help decrease the number of server adapters required to build a fully-virtualized server environment. Reducing server adapters reduces cabling, improves air flow and reduces overall power consumption.
OK, if you know me I can’t completely skip the details (hey, but at least I waited this long). Here it is quick and dirty. We expanded our solution technology integrator agreement with Cisco and are reselling the Cisco Nexus 5020 Switch with Dell PowerEdge servers. We have also qualified the Catalyst 4948 and 3750 Top-of-Rack Switches (ToR) switches for our EqualLogic™ Storage products. We’re happy to have a comprehensive portfolio of IT products and services to help companies simplify their data centers.
More information can be found on www.dell.com/ciscosolutions.