NetApp and Cisco have widened their joint portfolio of converged IT infrastructure solutions, upgrading this partnership’s flagship product FlexPod and adding a version of the product small and medium-size businesses can afford called Express Pod.

Brendon Howe, VP of product and solutions marketing at NetApp, said, “These solutions simplify data center infrastructure deployments and accelerate the move from fragmented application silos to shared, virtualized, and cloud environments.”

The biggest enhancement to FlexPod – combination of Cisco’s UCS servers and network switches and NetApp’s storage arrays – is support for VMware’s vSphere hypervisor running on NetApp’s Data OnTap oppertatig system in cluster mode. This gives customers the ability to expand storage clusters used as part of the FlexPod infrastructure into large and scalable storage pools.

These pooled resources can be isolated for multi-tenancy and allocated to different users dynamically.

Cisco and NetApp have also added validated design support for companies wanting to virtualize Oracle RAC databases using VMware vSphere and vCenter.

ExpressPod, the partners’ new Pod solution for SMBs, consists of Cisco UCS C-Series servers, NetApp FAS2220 or FAS2240 storage and Cisco Nexus 3048 switches. The bundle comes prepackaged and tested.

NetApp announced appointment of a new CTO this week. Jay Kidd, formerly product strategy and development head for its data management and management products, has taken the position.

Kidd Came to NetApp from Brocade, where he was CTO and VP of product management.

The company also appointed CA Technologies’ Jonathan Kissane as its new senior VP and chief strategy officer.