Extreme makes datacentre play with Lenovo and EMC tie-ups

Networking vendor stakes its claim for piece of HP and Cisco's converged infrastructure action with major new partnerships

Extreme Networks is seemingly making its push into the converged infrastructure space after agreeing partnerships with EMC and Lenovo.

Rival networking players HP and Cisco have made big pushes into the converged datacentre space in recent years, the former with a proprietary stack and the latter through partnerships with EMC, VMware and NetApp. Extreme's newly signed global reseller agreement with Lenovo will see the Chinese tin maker incorporate networking wares into its own compute and storage technologies.

Extreme also aims to provide support to Lenovo's recently announced membership of open source vendor Red Hat's OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network. Darrel Ward, vice president of marketing at Lenovo's Enterprise Product Group, claimed Extreme was the ideal networking player to realise the world's leading PC vendor's architecture ambitions.

"With Extreme Networks, we have found an excellent partner that will enable Lenovo to deliver a complete, open standards-based solution that will play a central role in allowing our customers to meet their goal of establishing cost-effective and scalable architectures," he added.

Extreme has also announced that its Open Fabric datacentre and cloud networking offering has been certified as part of EMC's Vspex cloud infrastructure. The networking player claims its reseller partners can now benefit from expanding their services around business continuity and disaster recovery.

Jake Howering, Extreme's director of datacentre solutions, said: "Meeting the vital network and storage orchestration requirements are key to further adoption of the cloud. We are backing EMC VSpex solutions with robust and open standards networking, including SDN-capable switches, allowing end customers to seamlessly deploy integrated storage networks with server virtualisation stacks."