Nimble Storage, the flash storage solutions company, today announced that the flash-optimized SmartStack, an integrated infrastructure solution by Nimble Storage and Cisco, has been deployed by more than 750 global enterprises, collectively achieving faster application deployments with reduced risk. Since 2012, Cisco and Nimble Storage have developed several SmartStack reference architecture-based solutions and Cisco Validated Designs targeting a range of use cases. This proven integrated infrastructure portfolio, comprising the Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) integrated infrastructure and the Nimble Adaptive Flash platform, has been deployed across a wide range of industries, including financial services, healthcare, education and service provider.

"Cisco and Nimble Storage have established an alliance to jointly develop innovative solutions to meet the needs of IT organizations in today's hypercompetitive global marketplace. We have a common mission to upend the barriers holding enterprise IT organizations back from realizing their full potential," said Satinder Sethi, vice president of data center solutions engineering for Cisco. "We will continue to bolster our portfolio and go-to-market programs leveraging the strengths of each organization to ensure the next generation of integrated infrastructure provides the most powerful, efficient and economical IT solution."

The Value of Nimble and Cisco SmartStack Integrated Infrastructure
"The requirements of cloud storage are becoming more stringent as enterprises migrate business-critical workloads to the public cloud. As a leading global cloud-hosting provider, we focus exclusively on ensuring that we have the most powerful infrastructure available to address the needs of IT organizations," said Justin Giardina, chief technology officer, iland. "Best-of-breed solutions from Nimble and Cisco underpin our cloud-based services and enable us to offer increased value to our customers in a timely fashion, all while achieving exceptional cost economics."

"Enterprises depend on ePlus as a trusted advisor to bring them the most efficient and cost effective infrastructure available to help them accelerate their business. Nimble offers innovative solutions based on next-generation technologies such as flash-based storage, which can be integrated with Cisco's compute offerings. The announcement of the SmartStack integrated infrastructure solutions backed by Cisco Validated Designs allows ePlus to offer our customers a modern flash-based integrated infrastructure solution," stated Andy Shulman, senior vice president, ePlus.

Enterprise IT organizations are under tremendous pressure to rapidly deploy data center infrastructure that supports both revenue-generating and productivity-enhancing applications. In an effort to keep pace with changing business requirements, many IT organizations have evaluated converged solutions - integrated infrastructure components that have been pre-validated for specific applications or workloads. SmartStack integrated infrastructure solutions backed by Cisco Validated Designs are based on a more flexible and efficient platform that overcomes the scalability limitations of existing integrated solutions that are based on legacy architectures. SmartStack solutions also offer advanced management and support automation, often lacking in existing offerings, through powerful cloud-based analytics.

"SmartStack is the first integrated infrastructure solution built on a modern, flash-optimized storage platform that has been architected to scale in line with customer requirements," said Suresh Vasudevan, CEO, Nimble Storage. "Together with Cisco, we've leveraged best-in-class infrastructure to develop a validated design that accelerates and scales enterprise-wide applications without increasing complexity. Our unique approach to integrated infrastructure with Cisco has enabled us to acquire more than 750 enterprise customers in just three years' time, which speaks volumes about our momentum and our go-forward potential."

The two companies will continue to build and leverage a global channel partner ecosystem to accelerate the go-to-market momentum and fulfillment of the SmartStack integrated infrastructure. Nimble Storage will leverage its distribution agreements to offer pre-integration and configuration services for the integrated infrastructure solutions. In addition to Nimble Storage best-in-class support, SmartStack integrated infrastructure customers can obtain end-to-end support directly through Cisco's Solution Support for Critical Infrastructure offering; realizing the ease of a single support experience.

"The storage industry has been through an impressive shift with the introduction of flash. Storage vendors who are engineering their platforms from the ground up to leverage flash intelligently are being rewarded with broad adoption of their technologies. Combining that storage engineering intelligence from Nimble Storage with best-of-breed compute from Cisco UCS for efficient deployment and scaling is what many enterprises are asking for as they look to realize efficiencies across their IT infrastructure," said Chad Cardenas, president at Trace 3.

New Cisco Validated Designs
The new SmartStack Cisco Validated Designs use best-in-class products from both companies, such as the Nimble Adaptive Flash platform, Cisco UCS, Cisco data center switching and Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite, to deliver enterprise-ready solutions. These SmartStack solutions, jointly supported by Cisco and Nimble, are designed to speed application deployments, scale infrastructure components independently, and simplify overall management.

Midsize enterprises or larger customers with departmental or distributed environments that require ease of deployment and management can deploy a SmartStack, which combines a Nimble CS300 array with a Cisco UCS Mini and vSphere 6.0. Future validated designs will target a range of large-scale enterprise use cases such as virtual infrastructure, virtual desktop infrastructure, databases, and other mission-critical deployments that use the entire family of products, including the Nimble CS700 FC-based array. Cisco and Nimble will also co-promote the SmartStack brand, engage in joint go-to-market activities and channel partner programs, and provide sizing and configuration tools to simplify the SmartStack ordering process.

SmartStack for SQL Server 2014
In addition to introducing new SmartStack Cisco Validated Designs, Nimble is also introducing its latest SmartStack reference architecture for SQL Server 2014, which addresses the migration requirements in advance of the pending end of life of SQL Server 2005. With the speed, scale and simplicity of the SmartStack solution the overall, TCO will be significantly reduced as IT organizations look to platform consolidation as well as upgrading to the latest releases of business-enabling applications.