Hitachi Vantara and Cisco are partnering to sell hybrid cloud managed services based on Cisco compute and networking, and Hitachi Vantara’s storage and management software.
Update. Hitachi Vantara and Cisco have changed the partnership’s original and temprary Hitachi | Cisco Hybrid Cloud name to the Hitachi EverFlex with Cisco Powered Hybrid Cloud. 3 February 2024.
The two suppliers set up global partnership agreements last summer, with Hitachi Vantara entering Cisco’s Service Provider and Solution Technology Integrator (STI) partner programs. The intent was to integrate Cisco UCS servers and its Nexus networking products with Hitachi Vantara storage such as the VSP arrays. That way Hitachi Vantara could represent itself as a more of a whole datacenter IT systems supplier and Cisco gets a more effective partner pushing its gear into enterprises.
They have announced the Hitachi EverFlex with Cisco Powered Hybrid Cloud with a portfolio of offerings such as infrastructure, IT, storage, and containers as a service, as well as data protection, to be sold on a consumption basis through Hitachi Vantara and Cisco’s partner channels. These offerings can be used on-premises or in the public cloud.
Kimberly King, SVP of strategic partners and alliances at Hitachi Vantara, said in a statement: ”Hitachi EverFlex with Cisco Powered Hybrid Cloud is a strategic response to modern enterprise needs. Our ability to deliver both through our partners and Cisco’s network directly tackles the complexity challenge by providing strong IT operational capabilities that can be scaled based on customer data management needs.”
Cisco’s Alexandra Zagury, VP of partner managed services, added: “Our joint efforts with Hitachi Vantara signify a great opportunity where we’re going beyond cloud capabilities to enable a holistic approach to business transformation.”
Hitachi Vantara is providing a managed services capability, hybrid cloud management, and predictive analytics. The two companies say their combined offering provides hybrid cloud acceleration, automation to increase efficiency, and added security and compliance.
Comment
The background here is that enterprises and public sector organizations tend to use a combination of on-premises and public cloud IT, with consumption-based billing applied. Hitachi Vantara competitors have announced branded hybrid cloud programs such as Dell’s APEX, HPE’s GreenLake, NetApp’s Keystone, and Pure’s EverGreen.
Hitachi Vantara has been busy setting up partnership deals such as one with CTERA for cloud file services, Model9 for mainframe data access, and SQream for massive data set access.
It wants to sell its own products and services as part of whole systems to its enterprise-class customers. This type of deal is a continuation and reinvention of the old converged infrastructure (CI) deals Cisco participated in with Dell and others back in the day.
Cisco devised its CI-based Cisco+ hybrid cloud service based on existing FlexPod and FlashStack deals with NetApp and Pure Storage in June 2022. The Hitachi EverFlex with Cisco Powered Hybrid Cloud is another example of this kind of deal and shows how long-lived the whole concept can be.
