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By Cara Garretson
Cisco, VMWare and NetApp on Tuesday announced an infrastructure blueprint for how enterprises and service providers can combine existing products from the three vendors to quickly build efficient and secure virtualized data centers.
The plan involves a design architecture that includes storage, computing platforms, networking and virtualization components and serves as a foundation for both public and private cloud computing infrastructures, the companies say. This architecture aims to boost the security of data located in the cloud by isolating the IT resources and applications of different clients, as well as of different business units or departments within the same company, to allow one cloud computing infrastructure to safely and efficiently serve multiple clients.
The components of this design architecture have been pre-tested and validated by the vendors, so that organizations leveraging the architecture can quickly configure and install the components without having to worry about product conflicts or configuration issues, the vendors say.
Called the Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture, this computing blueprint is designed for use by enterprises, systems integrators, and service providers that are developing public or private cloud services and need to accommodate multiple sets of users, or tenants. By isolating the server, network, and storage layers for each tenant, the proposed architecture allows the cloud provider to keep the different tenants' data separate and secure, and to be able to strike individual service-level agreements with each tenant. The advantage to these tenants is that they can take advantage of secure, highly available computing resources but still receive the cost and efficiency benefits of sharing the technology infrastructure with other tenants, according to the companies.
The architecture document includes details about how such an infrastructure can be built using existing products from Cisco, VMWare and NetApp, as well as configuration and maintenance information and best practices suggestions.
"We have defined and tested a dynamic data center infrastructure built on a flexible, cost-effective, high performance Ethernet framework that addresses four IT pillars: high availability, secure isolation, service assurance, and simplified management," says the NetApp Web site. "Together, we can help you quickly transform IT silos into a shared virtualized infrastructure. You'll be able to manage IT as a dynamic asset that reduces costs by up to 50 percent and quickly adapts to your changing business needs."
Among the products included in the architecture are Cisco's Nexus Series switches and its Unified Computing System, which includes it blade and rack-mount servers; NetApp's FAS (fabric-attached storage) devices with the company's MultiStore software; and VMWare's vSphere data center virtualization software and vShield Zones management program -- all of which are currently on the market today. These products were integrated and tested as a Cisco Validated Design to ensure compatibility, the vendors say.
The three companies say they will provide professional services to help customers and channel partners looking to implement the Multi-tenancy Design Architecture, as well as 24-hour support.
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