Posted by Sean Gilbert
Sr. Alliance SE
I’m the proverbial “man on the street” at Cisco Live 2012 today, asking attendees to comment on the two exciting joint announcements from VMware and Cisco this morning. Both pieces of news highlight the joint development our companies have undertaken to transform remote-office and branch-office (ROBO) operations.
First, let me quickly recap the announcements:
The New Cisco Cloud Services Router (CSR) is supported on VMware – What this means is your business can now connect its remote branches and mobile users to your cloud with a great user experience and consistent security—a key success factor in cloud deployments. Supported on VMware, Cisco’s CSR enables enterprises and cloud providers to have consistent networking capabilities across branches, datacenters and clouds. The CSR features a virtual IOS router with enterprise capabilities deployed off-site, in a cloud. The solution is optimized for single-tenant edge-router use cases such as virtual private network (VPN) and Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) termination and is seamlessly integrated into Cisco ISR and ASR end-to-end WAN architectures.
VMware technology is a critical component of the UCS-E Series Generation 2 – The Intel architecture blade server, based on UCS hardware design, enables a converged networking, computing and virtualization platform for hosting essential infrastructure services and mission-critical business applications in the lean branch office. The VMware platform is once again a critical component of this platform, enabling various Cisco vApps and vServices to run on a single blade for both ROBO and retail locations. While more than one-third of today’s business applications reside outside the datacenter in remote locations, the servers and desktops running these applications have traditionally been hard to manage, difficult to protect and costly to maintain. The combination of VMware and Cisco UCS-E can break down these barriers and provide an easy to deploy, secure and low-cost solution for ROBOs.
So what do attendees think? I caught up with a Director of IT for a Fortune 500 Manufacturing Company, outside of our theater session on Cisco VXI and VMware View who said, “This is an exciting integration announcement, it will increase flexibility and options for our move to the cloud while providing added security.”
Mark Douek, Solutions Architect for Strike Cloud agrees, “Cisco and VMware continue to be leaders in innovation. This solution will help accelerate customer's journey to the cloud and is just another example of their leadership in this space.”
So there you have it: A few reactions from the show floor to share the excitement of yesterday’s news. I look forward to keeping you apprised of implementation successes. If you’re here at the show, come by the VMware booth to attend one of the many theater sessions outlined by James Lomonaco in his previous blog post.
Also here is a photo taken at our booth yesterday with some very special guests, from left to right:
Rick Snyder, Cisco VP Global Partner Organization
Vittorio Viarengo, VMware VP for Desktop Product
John Chambers, Cisco CEO
Nitin Brahmankar, VMware Sr. Director, Global Cisco Alliance
Hatem Naguib, VMware VP Cisco, EMC, VCE Alliance
Reporting live from Cisco Live, I’m Sean Gilbert for VMware.