Cisco Offers SANs for VMware

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- As part of its Data Center 3.0 strategy, Cisco is collaborating with VMware to deliver a tested and validated solution for Cisco MDS storage area networks (SANs) designed specifically to help customers improve the security, scalability and management of storage networks attached to VMware environments. This solution supports Cisco's vision to help its customers to design and build next generation data centers. The Cisco vision for Data Center 3.0 entails the real-time, dynamic orchestration of infrastructure services from shared pools of virtualized server, storage and network resources, while optimizing application performance, service levels, efficiency and collaboration.

Virtual machines allow information technology (IT) managers to run multiple applications and operating systems on a single physical machine. Virtualizing the data center improves resource use and provides a simpler and more efficient computing model to meet customer needs. The combined solution of Cisco MDS SANs with VMware's Virtual Datacenter OS (VDC-OS) helps customers to more easily implement storage consolidation, disaster recovery, business continuity and storage backup solutions, as well as improve the visibility, security, and traffic isolation of applications. VMware provides this functionality as part of the VDC-OS, which increases ROI while enabling the flexibility customers need to build next-generation data centers that are highly elastic, self-managing and self-healing. Cisco MDS SANs can now be virtual machine-optimized, delivering a resilient, high-performance fabric to support large, dense virtual environments by providing consistent policy, visibility, and diagnostics for virtual machines across the data center.

"We have a complex virtual IT environment at Trinity Health, and we look to our key vendors such as VMware and Cisco to collaborate in simplifying and optimizing joint solutions so they work together to our best advantage," said Mark Trancygier, storage architect, Trinity Health. "Cisco MDS 9000 helps us to scale our virtual machine-attached SAN infrastructure, and this collaboration will help us further our goals to achieve an end-to-end virtualized storage environment."

Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO)

VMware Inc.