Hybrid Multicloud IT Teams Benefit from Cisco and Nutanix Partnership

In this Tech Barometer podcast segment, explore how a partnership between data networking giant Cisco and hybrid multicloud software company Nutanix is changing perspectives and opening opportunities for people who build and manage IT operations.

Find more enterprise cloud news, features stories and profiles at The Forecast.

Transcript:

Lee Caswell: 750 million new applications in the next three years, more than the past 40 years of computing. How do you assimilate that quickly without overrunning your staff?

Jason Burns: You’re able to roll out these applications and not have to worry about how much time it might take to stand up new servers, stand up the network. All of that piece just can be more seamlessly provisioned so that you have more time to deploy applications.

Lee Caswell: Let’s say it a different way. Infrastructure doesn’t get in the way of supporting new applications. The best partnerships are customer-driven.

Jason Lopez: Those are the voices of Lee Caswell, vice president of Product and Solutions Marketing and Jason Burns, Director of Technical Marketing, both of Nutanix. This is the Tech Barometer Podcast Here, they’re in conversation about the evolving nature of network infrastructure and application deployment in the context of Nutanix’s partnership with Cisco. They chat about different perspectives and understandings that network, storage, and compute teams bring to the table, unified communications and Cisco UCS, rapid application deployment and many other facets of the partnership

[Related:Focus Shifts to Migration in Wake of Broadcom’s VMware Acquisition]

Lee Caswell: Today, for example, I was talking to a customer who’s the first Cisco customer we have in the Americas, not the first we have worldwide. And one of the things that really stuck out for them was the relationship that they have with Cisco, you know, expanding from networking into compute, has really meant that they have a level of trust there and confidence. And now that Cisco’s reselling the Nutanix offer, it’s really bringing together the networking and the, call it the infrastructure teams, in a way that we brought in the past, the storage and the compute teams together. So I’m curious on your perspective on that, Jason.

Jason Burns: From my perspective, I’ve seen the same thing. When customers are deploying a solution from Cisco, it is exactly that. Oftentimes you’ll see something with the unified communications on top of Cisco UCS and the Cisco networking piece as well. And so the combination there of being able to bring in the entire application on top of the computing system and then the storage as well is really appealing to the customers. And then having that delivered as a solution rather than something that they’re piecing together part by part.

Lee Caswell: You know, as I’m watching and talking to some of the Cisco folks, there’s some really interesting things that Nutanix does that they didn’t have access to before and now make it just easier to sell anHCI-based solution. One is, you know, the ability to have mixed nodes, for example, to be able to have nodes with different capabilities, whether it’s disk and flash or different CPU capabilities. That level of flexibility actually makes it a lot easier to sell this. And now integration, you know, support for ACI, for example, really helps from an integrated management solution. So I’m seeing those two things really set the bar as to how we’re now we’re bridging the network stack along with compute and storage.

Jason Burns: Yeah, the integration ofNutanix AHV and Cisco ACI is something that I’m personally excited about. As a former network engineer, I love to see the automation point where we can make networks inside of the network fabric and have that pushed into the compute fabric. What you get from that action is a system where you’re able to really easily deploy applications because the network substrate is already there for them. That’s part of what Cisco has done to integrate with Nutanix AHV. That’s really complemented by what Nutanix is doing on the virtualization side, both with our flow virtual networking and flow network security for virtual networks and micro-segmentation inside the hypervisor itself. So you have this physical network layer that Cisco is providing, and then you have the virtual network layer that Nutanix provides there, and that’s all being tied together.

Lee Caswell: Yeah, it’s kind of fun. I ...