The VAR Guy

Cisco Systems showed up at the Red Hat North American Partner Conference chatting up its renewed relationship and collaboration with the Red Hat team. The goal? To create solutions that make it easier for Red Hat to proliferate into the data center, for both the channel and customer alike. Details coming up …

The new Cisco/Red Hat collaboration is as follows:

• Red Hat receives partner designation in Cisco’s cloud program: With Red Hat joining the Cisco Cloud Program, it’s apparently the first time an “open source virtualization solution” has come to Cisco’s Unified Computing Solution platform. The joint solution promises to bring “innovative solutions” that have been “closely” collaborated on. A more definitive outline still remains to be seen.
• Cisco and Red Hat offer RHEL with FlexPod: FlexPod, as you might remember, is the NetApp/Cisco virtualization project, essentially a blueprint for deploying a pre-configured interoperable virtualization environment specifically designed for scalability. Now, Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be part of that mix, and will be part of Cisco’s Validated Design (CVD) program. Ideally, Red Hat now has another avenue to find its way into enterprise data centers, potentially even through Cisco VARs. In addition to the CVD induction, Red Hat will also be made compatible with Secure Separation, a process that ensures secure “separate multi-tenant environments for non-virtualized workloads, alongside virtualized ones.”

Both Cisco and Red Hat stress these moves will help migrate users into cloud-based solutions, although these collaborations seem to be bringing Red Hat deeper into existing cloud technology, rather than bringing an end-to-end solution for customers to go 100 percent cloud. At any rate, if you’re a reseller of FlexPod solutions, you have access to Red Hat-based CVD and FlexPod solutions right now. Intrigued, but not a partner? Dive deeper into the program, with Red Hat’s Cisco portal here.

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