Further heating up competition in the space of highly virtualized full-package IT infrastructure solutions and giving another nudge to the adoption of virtualization technologies, Cisco, NetApp and VMware announced a new architecture that includes the vendors’ respective server/network, storage and virtualization products.

The physical package, validated by all three companies, consists of Cisco’s Unified Computing System, its Nexus-series switches and NetApp’s FAS storage arrays. The stack, dubbed Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture, will leverage VMware virtualization technology.

It will be available through channel partners that have access to all three companies’ products and customers will be able to leverage a combined pool of the three vendors’ support resources created specifically for the new architecture.

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For Cisco, the move means strengthening its play in the server space, a relatively new market for the company, which it entered in March 2009 by announcing UCS.

The move also adds to Cisco’s ability to compete in the race to provide full-stack IT solutions. The announcement came less than two weeks after another announcement by HP and Microsoft, in which the companies said they were also planning to jointly roll out a complete virtualized solution that would include servers, storage and network components.

Cisco will also benefit from the new arrangement by creating another option of a full-stack IT offering that pairs its products with storage provided by yet another vendor. Plans to offer a comparable package with storage arrays by EMC – a major NetApp competitor – were announced in November 2009.

VMware (80 percent owned by EMC) was also part of that announcement, supplying virtualization platform for the yet-unreleased product called Vblock.

Cisco calls this strategy of partnering up with vendors to jointly validate combined solutions for sale through common channel partners an “open partner ecosystem.” As Cisco’s John Growdon explained, both Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture and Vblock were two examples of the ecosystem at work.

Growdon is a senior director of Cisco’s Data Center and Worldwide Channels Go-To-Market organization.

“We’ve come out with our alliance and our relationship here with EMC and now we have this with (NetApp),” he said. “We’ve been on a path (to) this open-ecosystem environment for quite some time.”

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NetApp VP of Solutions Marketing Patrick Rogers said the new agreement did not add any channel partners to the storage vendor’s reseller pool besides the ones already distributing the company’s products.

There is “already a pretty extensive set of channel partners that we have in common with Cisco and VMware,” he said. “If you name the top 10 data center resellers for Cisco, VMware NetApp, they’re pretty much the same retail integrators and resellers.”

The agreement will strengthen NetApp’s ability to compete with other storage vendors, including EMC, by creating yet another way to package its products with UCS.

While included in the group of top-five external disk storage vendors, NetApp is at the bottom of the short list in terms of market share, splitting the spot with Dell, according to an IDC report on the market in the third quarter of 2009. EMC had the largest market share (24.2 percent), followed by IBM (13.2 percent) and HP (11.8 percent).

Another benefit for NetApp is in the ability to bring on board customers who until now have been reluctant to switch to a highly virtualized shared infrastructure for security reasons, according to Rogers, an issue that cannot be fully addressed at the storage level.

“The main way that we’re going to benefit is that we’re solving a pretty significant customer problem that is not fully controlled by storage,” he said. With each of the three vendors providing solutions that give each application its own highly segregated segment of the corresponding component of the infrastructure, a lot of the existing security anxieties can be calmed.

“Now you have an end-to-end virtual private container consisting of servers, network and storage resources. To an application administrator … it feels to them like they have their own dedicated server, network and storage assets.” In reality, they’re sharing a physical infrastructure with other users.

NetApp’s segmentation-enabling solution is MultiStore, a software application that creates separate private virtual partitions on one physical storage system. The new architecture includes MultiStore – a product that is usually sold separately as an optional add-on to NetApp’s storage operating system ONTAP.

From Cisco’s side, the network resource is segmented by the vendor’s VN-Link, a technology that enables virtual connections between multiple virtual servers and virtual network interface cards within a shared physical infrastructure.

On the server virtualization end, the new architecture will deploy VMware’s vShield Zones, meant to securely isolate virtual machines running on a shared physical server from one another.

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