Dell & Juniper partner for data centre virtualisation

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 28 October 2009 17:23

IT Industry - Strategy

The announcement also represents the latest move by Juniper in its data centre virtualisation strategy, first unveiled as the Stratus Project in February 2009. Juniper has already announced a similar OEM agreement with IBM as part of this strategy.

This vision parallels that of Cisco, which announced its data centre virtualisation plans in March, and earlier this month its concept of the borderless network.

Dell also has a long established OEM partnership with Cisco. Larry Hart, worldwide product manager for Dell's storage and networking group, said this would continue and he defended this seeming conflict by saying "It is not unusual in the high tech sector for companies to have areas where they co-operate and areas where they compete. We have a great OEM relationship with Cisco, notably in the blade space, and we have extended that recently to include Catalyst switches and the Nexus product."

Dell also announced earlier this year a partnership with Brocade. Hart said: "With Brocade we will bring to market a solution that is based on the data centre and on storage. They recently acquired Foundry Networks, which gave then a great story in the ethernet space, but Juniper came from the wide area network and then the security space. They have arrived at the same end point from different directions and by combining the two we get a best-in-class solution...The Juniper partnership helps us get into areas we have not been active in before, notably security and WAN."

Hart added "With virtualisation I envisage a world where notebooks may be entirely virtualised where you connect back to the data centre to make that notebook function. And to get there you need a strong ethernet core for the data centre, a strong WAN offering and a great security solution."

He said the first products from the partnership would hit the market in the first half of 2010 and products would roll out progressively after that.

Stuart Corner is in  New York as a guest of Juniper Networks for its major global announcement scheduled for 01:00 hours on Friday 30 October, AEST.