Red Hat and Cisco Deliver Joint Solutions for Accelerating Customer Cloud Adoption

This week, Red Hat kicks off its North America Partner Conference, taking place October 25-27 in Miami.  The Partner Conference will bring together the many Red Hat partners throughout North America to discuss Red Hat’s products, solutions and plans for the future with Red Hat executives and engineers.  Presentations will be delivered by Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat President and CEO, Paul Cormier, EVP and President, Products and Technologies, and leaders of the cloud, middleware, channel, platform, sales and government teams at Red Hat.  Cisco, a long-time strategic partner for Red Hat, presented a keynote yesterday by Ralph Nimergood, Worldwide Vice President, Channel and Cloud GTM.

During Cisco’s partner keynote at the event, Nimergood touched on the extensive collaboration that Red Hat and Cisco have enjoyed over the years of our partnership.  Back in March 2009, Red Hat and Cisco announced that we were working together to deliver Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization software with the, at the time new, Cisco Unified Computing System.  Since, our companies have increased the momentum in our partnership, including sales, marketing and engineering investments and collaboration, specifically around customer adoption of the cloud.  Together, Red Hat and Cisco are setting the stage for cloud adoption by supporting early phases of adoption like migration with comprehensive solution sets.

Today, showing continued momentum for our partnership, we have several announcements to make in collaboration with Cisco:

• Red Hat has received a technology partner designation in the Cisco Cloud Program, marking the first offering of an open source virtualization solution with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization built on Cisco Unified Computing Solution (UCS).  With this, our companies are committed to working closely together to bring our customers to the cloud with innovative solutions.
• In collaboration with partner NetApp, Red Hat and Cisco are also offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux built on FlexPod for the first time as part of the Cisco Validated Design (CVD) Program, which consists of systems and solutions designed, tested and documented to facilitate faster, more reliable and more predictable customer deployments.  FlexPod is a prevalidated configuration from Cisco and NetApp that delivers an optimized datacenter solution built on the Cisco UCS, Cisco Nexus datacenter switches and NetApp FAS storage components.
• The availability of the Secure Separation Using Red Hat Enterprise Linux Flexpod offering via the CVD Program. Secure Separation Built on FlexPod is a capability that extends the FlexPod reference architecture to securely separate multi-tenant environments for non-virtualized workloads, alongside virtualized ones.  These capabilities make FlexPod a compelling application platform to deploy a wide range of application environments on a common, flexible and manageable infrastructure.  In the Red Hat-specific offering, Red Hat worked closely with NetApp and Cisco to implement securely separated non-virtualized tenants in a datacenter built on FlexPod using Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Network Satellite. Secure Separation Built on FlexPod and the entire FlexPod series of design and deployment guides provide businesses with confidence and agility to deploy their cloud-ready infrastructure.

The CVD Program FlexPod offerings featuring Red Hat solutions are available via the channel from resellers of FlexPod.

For more information about the Red Hat and Cisco partnership, visit http://www.redhat.com/promo/cisco/.

For more information about the Red Hat North America Partner Conference, visit http://www.redhat.com/partnerconference/.