Cisco and NetApp have been partners for over a decade, and in January we announced the planned expansion of our partnership. We are always looking to work with our partners in new ways to offer customers greater choice, and Cisco and NetApp are working toward delivering a complete platform for enterprises in data-intensive industries with business-critical SLAs. The solution will offer pre-sized storage, networking, and compute in a highly reliable, ready-to-deploy Hadoop stack, and it is planned to be generally available summer 2013. But, who can wait until summer?! I know we can't, so we're going to offer a demo of the joint reference architecture at Cisco Live! Melbourne March 5-8, and we hope you'll stop by to check it out!

To give you more information on the solution - it will be pre-validated for enterprise Hadoop deployments built using 6296 Fabric Interconnects (connectivity and management), a pair of Nexus 2232s, C220 M3 Servers (compute) and NetApp E5400 and FAS 2240 series storage arrays. Following the -highly successful -FlexPod model of pre-sized rack level configurations, this solution will be made available through the well-established FlexPod sales engagement and channel. Field sales and partners from both companies will resell the solution upon general availability.

This is an extension of Cisco's Common Platform for Big Data for those who need enterprise class external storage array features like RAID protection with data replication, hot-swappable spares, proactive drive health monitoring, faster recovery from disk failures and automated I/O path failover. The solution will offer industry leading storage density, over a petabyte of user storage capacity per rack, and up to 10 petabytes of scalability in a single switching domain. Unique to this architecture is seamless management integration and data integration capabilities with existing FlexPod deployments that can help to significantly lower the infrastructure and management costs.

For those of you who are interested in this solution, the Cisco Validated Design (CVD) is planned to be published in March, and remember to stop by NetApp booth at the World of Solutions if you are headed to Cisco Live! Melbourne to check out the full demo and pick up a data sheet !

Check out blog by Iyer Venkatesan of NetApp, and Joint Solution Brief.