Revealed: Details of the NetApp, Cisco and VMware alliance

NetApp, Cisco and VMware will target system integrators with a jointly-developed design architecture for shared virtual environments under a deal announced on Tuesday.

The three companies took the wraps off their alliance - possibly the worst-kept secret in the IT industry - which will offer the design to firms that want to either create a shared virtual or cloud offering, or sell the idea to their own customers.

But the announcement stopped short of the vendors creating their own cloud offering, as had been speculated in the past couple of months.

"We're not a service provider ourselves," VMware managing director for A/NZ Paul Harapin said.

"We leave that to those that have it as their core business. We work with our partners in the service provider community to give them the basis for their offerings."

Cisco and NetApp also said they were "not in the business of competing with [their] customers".

Peter O'Connor, area vice president for NetApp, named CSC, Alphawest, Dimension Data, Data #3 and Fujitsu among "key and important partners for all three" vendors in the alliance.

"Some of these organisations are rolling out their own public cloud environments or motivating their sales forces to go and sell private clouds," he said.

Harapin said he hadn't "had the opportunity to discuss [the new design architecture] in any detail" with any of VMware's customers.

According to a statement, the design architecture will "help enterprise customers, systems integrators and service providers develop internal and external cloud services that isolate clients, business units, departments or security zones across the computing, networking, storage and management layers of a unified infrastructure".

"Every service provider will need to deliver isolation between their clients," O'Connor said.

Joint support

The three vendors said they will offer a "common support model" for partners and customers that used the design architecture.

"A call to any one of the three [vendor] organisations will deliver the same level of support for the design," O'Connor said.

Details on what the model would look like were "still being worked out".

"The number of support staff is yet to be determined," O'Connor said.

There would likely be variances by country in how the model was implemented, but Australia's implementation would be made easier because all three vendors already had a strong local presence.

"Different models may need to be explored where we don't have a presence," O'Connor said.

Competitors

All three vendors were unperturbed by competition in the space, namely from the recently-formed partnership between Microsoft and HP.

"We're not too concerned by what our competitors are doing," O'Connor said.

"We believe a best-of-breed environment will always succeed."

Kevin Bloch, chief technology officer of Cisco A/NZ, believed the alliance's focus on "secure multi-tenancy" set it apart from Microsoft-HP.

And Harapin believed the alliance's partner focus would enable it to succeed.

"One of the key parts of this announcement is the three vendors aren't taking this to market directly," Harapin said.

"The focus is on partners. This is different to some of the other players in the market.

We'll be using our systems integrators and partners to get this to market."