NetApp and Cisco Pitch FlexPod as Pretested Platform for Production AI

The joint franchise has served 10,000 enterprise customers and generated $21 billion in ecosystem value over 16 years, according to Alvaro Celis, NetApp's chief partner and ecosystem officer. Celis said the companies have created strong engineering alignment among Cisco, NetApp and their shared channel, allowing customers to execute at scale.

Celis and James Cole, Cisco's vice president of data center networking, business development, partnerships and go-to-market, spoke with theCUBE's Rebecca Knight and Christophe Bertrand during an exclusive broadcast at NetApp INSIGHT. TheCUBE is SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio.

Cole said AI workloads behave differently from the traditional applications that shaped data center design for decades. They draw simultaneously on storage, networking, compute and security, and that complexity can delay deployments.

“20 years ago, 10 years ago, you would've been designing your data structures and your applications around the infrastructure. Now we've turned that on its head,” Cole said. “You're really designing the infrastructure around the movement of data. Who better to do that together than the person you trust with your data and the person you trust with your network?”

Validated designs are the partners' answer to that complexity. In June, the companies expanded FlexPod for AI deployments. The goal is to give customers a choice of best-in-class products without handing them the integration burden, Celis said.

“The power that it really brings is it allows us to look at alignment at the product level, service, support, the ecosystem integration that you need in order for the customer to have the flexibility that they want, but also with the certainty that it will work and it can work at scale,” Celis said.

More joint work on FlexPod AI is coming, and new companies are expected to join the partnership, according to Celis. Cole said the franchise's nearly two-decade track record is what qualifies it for the next phase.

“In almost two decades, we've learned, we've adjusted, we've grown, we've made it better,” Cole said. “Now we're taking that two decades of experience and bringing it to bear in AI, which is the most transformative infrastructure event we've had in many, many decades.”

The executive comments reflect a broader shift described by SiliconANGLE: decades of do-it-yourself best-of-breed infrastructure are giving way to pretested stacks as AI raises integration risk. NetApp and Cisco are betting that validated converged systems will reduce deployment risk for enterprises that need AI in production.

The interview was part of SiliconANGLE's and theCUBE's coverage of NetApp INSIGHT. TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the NetApp INSIGHT 2026 event; NetApp and other sponsors do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE, according to the disclosure accompanying the interview.