300-725 reality - Securing the Web with Cisco Web Security Appliance (SWSA) Updated: 2024

Officials of the two technology giants on Monday unveiled an agreement under which Cisco, San Jose, Calif., will sell EMC NAS appliances under the Cisco brand as part of a solution to allow centralized backup of data from remote offices over IP networks.

There are two parts to the agreement, said George Kurian, vice president and general manager of Cisco's Caching Services Business Unit.

The first is an agreement to develop technology aimed at optimizing wide area networks (WANs) to remove PC servers from branch offices while moving data storage to a centralized location, Kurian said. This is based on Cisco's WAN File Access technology, which the company introduced last month along with a new series of Cisco File Engine appliances to move data across a WAN with the performance of a LAN.

The second is an OEM agreement under which Cisco will sell and support EMC's NS500 and NS700 NAS appliances rebranded with the Cisco moniker.

The NS500 and NS700 have the same hardware as EMC's Clariion CX500 and CX700, except that the NS family is a NAS appliance with an IP interface, compared to the CX family's use as a SAN array, said Tom Joyce, senior director for platforms marketing at EMC, Hopkinton, Mass. As such, the NS family connects direct to an IP network, while the CX arrays connect to a SAN, he said.

Under the agreement, Cisco will sell the NS500 or NS700 with Cisco File Engines as a complete solution for WAN-based data protection, Kurian said. An enterprise can purchase an NS500 or NS700, depending on capacity requirements, for a central data backup location, along with a Cisco File Engine appliance for each remote branch office. The Cisco File Engines would be connected to the NAS appliance to handle remote data backup.

Kurian compared the new Cisco bundle to the way in which data at remote offices is now typically protected. He said the typical enterprise today requires a PC server or high-end workstation with its own storage capacity, backup and security software, operating system, tape autoloader and a local IT person. That solution might run between $30,000 and $40,000 per year per office, Kurian said. However, putting a Cisco File Engine, with a list price of $12,000, in each remote office with an EMC NAS appliance in a central location could be treated more as a one-time capital expense of $10,000 to $15,000 per remote office, he said.

While it is possible for solution providers to put together a similar bundle using a Cisco File Engine and an EMC or other NAS appliance, the new Cisco bundle offers the advantage of coming from a single vendor, Kurian said. "That leave just one throat to choke," he said.

The Cisco File Engine was released to the company's channel last month, Kurian said. Cisco plans to offer the new bundle through its field sales force and direct solution providers during the second quarter of this year, with sales through its two-tier channel partners expected to start sometime after that, he said.

Cisco announced this morning that it intends to acquire Isovalent, a cloud-native security and networking startup that should fit well with the company’s core networking and security strategy. The companies did not share the purchase price.

Isovalent has helped develop eBPF, a key open source technology that gives developers deep insight into the operating system layer, typically Linux, but also Windows, while Cilium, another open source project created by the startup, gives visibility into cloud native applications. Tetragon is the company’s open source security visibility component.

Tom Gillis, senior VP and general manager of Cisco’s Security Business Group, says the combination of these three elements used to be provided by a hardware appliance, but in the cloud world is increasingly software-driven. “In a cloud world, there’s still boxes in there somewhere, but it’s abstracted under layers and layers of software. And so eBPF and Cilium provide that visibility for cloud world,” he told TechCrunch.

Specifically, that involves being able to see exactly what’s happening as an application interacts with the network, and being able to determine whether that looks normal or not. “What this allows anyone to do is to provide a very high level of visibility into the inner workings of an application. So when one little container is talking to another container, Cilium can intercept and see that traffic, and it can also see the inner workings of the OS itself,” he said. “So this becomes a platform that allows us to provide connectivity, like should this particular cluster talk to that particular cluster, yes or no. But also security inspection, like what are they talking about? Does this make sense? Does this thing look logical?”

It’s worth noting that Cilium is the default connectivity and security piece for Google Kubernetes Engine, Google Anthos and Amazon EKS Anywhere. It’s also being used in a who’s who of large enterprises including Adobe, Bell Canada, Capital One, Datadog, Palantir, IKEA and Sky.

It’s always tricky when a large company buys a startup built on popular open source projects like this and it could potentially cause consternation in both the community and the large companies who have come to depend on this software. Isovalent has key roles at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and eBPF Foundation, where they are also big code contributors. But Gillis says it’s in the best interest of everyone that the open source pieces thrive as a standard going forward.

“In order for that to happen Cilium and eBPF need to thrive, and so the community needs to continue to embrace them because the ubiquity of the standard is what makes it so powerful,” he said. Gillis sees it a lot like Kubernetes, which Google created and then open sourced. “I oftentimes say it’s the Kubernetes of the data path. It allows it’s an open standard that all can participate in, allows everyone to innovate on top of this platform, and build amazing products,” he said.

Jeetu Patel, executive vice president and general manager of security and collaboration at Cisco, said that it is essential for companies to work together where security is concerned. “One of the challenges that we’ve said is the true enemy [in security] is not your competitor, it’s the [common] adversary. And we need to make sure that we stay open in this market and co-innovate, and I think open source is probably one of the best models to co-innovate with,” Patel said.

Cisco was familiar with the company, even before today’s announcement, having participated in the company’s $29 million Series A at the end of 2020. The startup added a $40 million Series B in 2022 with Cisco also participating along with other strategic investors including Microsoft, Google and Grafana Labs.

Cisco has been extremely acquisitive this year, with this representing the eleventh acquisition by the company, the fifth related to security. The biggest of the bunch by far was the $28 billion Splunk deal announced in September.

This deal is expected to close some time in the second quarter next year (the company’s third quarter of its fiscal year).

SimpliVity, a "hyper-converged" infrastructure startup, has inked an agreement with Cisco Systems to Excellerate its position in one of enterprise technology's hottest market segments, CRN has learned.

SimpliVity and Cisco will reveal their agreement next week during VMware's annual VMworld conference, sources familiar with the vendors' plans told CRN, speaking on condition of anonymity.

SimpliVity currently uses Dell's x86 server hardware for its flagship hyper-converged appliance, OmniCube, which combines compute, storage backup and deduplication, networking, and WAN optimization in a single appliance.

Under terms of its deal with Cisco, SimpliVity will sell OmniCubes based on the networking giant's Unified Computing System servers, sources told CRN.

Sources said it's unclear which Cisco UCS servers SimpliVity will be using. The startup can't use Cisco's UCS B-series blade servers because OmniCube uses a proprietary storage deduplication card that doesn't fit in that product, said the sources.

Related: In Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Blockbuster, Dell To OEM Nutanix Software

SimpliVity will likely use Cisco's UCS C-Series rack-mounted servers for OmniCubes, or even its new entry-level "UCS Mini" server, which CRN first reported on in June, the sources said.

The SimpliVity-Cisco deal comes three months after Nutanix and Dell shook up the hyper-converged market with an OEM agreement. Dell is both reselling Nutanix and integrating it on Dell servers.

It's not clear if Cisco will also be reselling SimpliVity's OmniCubes and software stack, sources said.

The SimpliVity-Cisco deal also isn't exclusive to Cisco; over time, other server vendors will be invited to take part, according to the sources. SimpliVity will also continue to sell OmniCubes based on Dell servers, sources said.

VMware and SimpliVity have a tight relationship and OmniCubes are specially designed to work well in VMware environments. However, some VMware partners believe the Cisco-SimpliVity agreement could put pressure on that partnership.

Doron Kempel, chairman and CEO of Westborough, Mass.-based SimpliVity, declined to comment on the Cisco-SimpliVity agreement during an interview Monday.

Kempel did say that SimpliVity will only make strategic moves that benefit its channel and industry partners.

"We are 100 percent channel oriented and will continue to take steps to make sure SimpliVity goes through the channel with systems integrators and VARs," he said.

Representatives from Cisco couldn't be reached for comment on the SimpliVity agreement. VMware also couldn't be reached for comment.

By revealing their agreement at VMworld, Cisco and SimpliVity may be trying to steal some thunder from VMware's top secret "Marvin" project, which is said to be a reference architecture for a hyper-converged appliance that runs on low-end servers.

NEXT: How The Cisco-SimpliVity Deal Could Impact The Hyper-Converged Market

VMware's Marvin is said to feature the Palo Alto, Calif.-based vendor's NSX software-defined networking technology and its VSAN storage technology. VMware is also building a version of Marvin for parent company EMC, which is called Project Mystic, sources said.

Since Cisco is pushing its own competing Application-Centric Infrastructure (ACI) SDN technology, it's probably not going to take part in Marvin, especially since its relationship with VMware has grown increasing strained in exact years.

VMware's Marvin will also compete with SimpliVity OmniCubes, but Kempel said the increased attention that comes from big vendors entering the hyper-converged space will benefit his firm.

"We’re not surprised that all server vendors are going to carry Marvin. It's great, because it will make hyper-converged the new reality," Kempel said. "Our most important partner is VMware and we will continue to work closely with them."

SimpliVity has raised $101.5 million in funding since its founding in 2009 but is still trailing rival Nutanix in sales, one partner who has worked with both vendors told CRN. The Cisco UCS deal could help change that, he said.

"SimpliVity needs to do something like this, because the channel is not adopting them as quickly as Nutanix," said the partner. "With EMC and VMware building their own hyper-converged, products, SimpliVity needs to find away to get deeper into the data center."

Another source with ties to both vendors, who requested anonymity, said SimpliVity has the edge on Nutanix when it comes to the storage technology piece of hyper-converged appliances.

"They do have very good special sauce that no one else has when it comes to dedupe/compression/optimization of data inline," said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect his relationships with the vendors.

John Woodall, vice president of engineering at Integrated Archive Systems (IAS), a Palo Alto, Calif.-based Cisco partner, thinks a Cisco-SimpliVity agreement would be an interesting counterweight to Dell's deal with Nutanix.

"Cisco has the long-rumored, now real UCS Mini as well as Invicta storage," Woodall said. "SimpliVity has pretty good technology. It would be a good choice for Cisco."

With additional reporting by Joseph F. Kovar

Major appliances are a big purchase for most people, and buyers want them to last. Consumer Reports’ surveys have found that, from refrigerators to laundry machines, our members rank reliability as more important than price or performance. That’s why we are rolling out CR’s updated Appliance Brand Reliability Rankings, which let you quickly compare brands across all major appliances. Here’s everything you need to know about the reliability of your appliances—and how to make them last.

Updated January 5, 2024

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