Cisco Systems

Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO) is one of EMC's most strategic alliance partners. Recently Cisco and EMC, together with VMware, formed the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition to accelerate massive virtualization and private cloud infrastructure.

Cisco and EMC have been collaborating for years to provide customers with information infrastructure that combines EMC's expertise in storing, protecting, and managing vast amounts of information with the power of Cisco's intelligent network. Through joint product development, solutions, services, and support, the alliance helps customers radically simplify their infrastructure and operations.

Delivering on the promise of next-generation virtualized data centers

Integrating Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS) with EMC's broad portfolio of information infrastructure technologies such as IT management solutions, industry-leading storage platforms, and VMware's powerful virtualization tools allows customers to take a new approach to simplifying data center complexities while lowering cost of ownership.

With the launch of Cisco's UCS, we're focused on testing products for interoperability and developing data center solution and service offerings that are optimized for virtualization. EMC and VMware, along with Cisco, share a common vision that enterprise IT will eventually evolve toward a private cloud model, and we are committed to working together to achieve this vision.

Virtualization is at the core of next-generation data center architectures. EMC, Cisco, and VMware have been working together to provide the efficiency, control, and flexibility our customers need in next-generation data center architectures.

Joint solution offerings

EMC and Cisco have long worked together to bring a variety of solutions to market including:

• Storage connectivity and consolidation — Consolidating your infrastructure with EMC storage technologies and the Cisco MDS family of storage area network (SAN) directors and switches helps increase efficiencies and utilization and streamline infrastructure management. With options that enable high-speed Fibre Channel connectivity and intelligent IP storage networking, EMC and Cisco offer the flexibility you need to get the most out of your IT investments.
• Virtualization — You can manage heterogeneous storage resources more efficiently, dramatically reduce downtime, and make data protection and copy services more flexible and cost-effective through virtualization. In addition, storage virtualization with EMC Invista and Cisco MDS SSM can help you to reduce the cost and risk associated with large-scale movement of information.
• IT Resource management — EMC and Cisco have worked together to bring IT resource management tools and automation software to better help their customers effectively manage today's global information infrastructure through tight integration between EMC resource management software products and Cisco's MDS family of SAN directors and switches.
• Information protection — RSA, the Security Division of EMC, and Cisco have announced a collaborative effort to develop technology that will help you improve and simplify the encryption of confidential information. Together, these technologies help you to encrypt data-at-rest on tapes and other types of storage media and manage the associated encryption keys within the SAN infrastructure.
• Business continuity — The combination of Cisco's SANTap and EMC RecoverPoint products enables you to build state-of-the art business continuity solutions. Cisco SANTap intelligent fabric technology in combination with RecoverPoint's continuous remote replication and continuous data protection capabilities facilitate the deployment of network-based replication for advanced recovery.

Consulting and integrated services

EMC Infrastructure Consulting and Cisco Advanced Services have collaborated on a suite of service offerings focused on helping our customers achieve their efficient IT goals. The combined services—which range from consolidation and virtualization and data center operations to governance, risk, and compliance—unite the best-in-class competencies of our companies.

Industry-leading customer service

Joint customers of Cisco and EMC are assured the same industry-leading level of service and support they have come to expect from both companies thanks to Cisco's joint customer support agreement with EMC.

About Cisco

Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide leader in networking, transforming how people connect, communicate, and collaborate. Today networks are an essential part of business, education, government, and home communications, and Cisco's networking solutions are the foundation of these networks.

Since the company's inception, Cisco engineers have been leaders in the development of networking technologies. Today this tradition of innovation continues with industry-leading products and solutions in the company's core development areas of routing and switching as well as in advanced technologies such as IP communications, wireless local area network (LAN), storage area networking, home networking, network security, video systems, application networking systems, and the recently introduced Unified Computing System (UCS) platform that enables the virtualized data center.