NetApp’s converged infrastructure (CI) product, launched today, uses Cisco hardware for compute, network, and storage.

The two companies first partnered on the FlexPod portfolio seven years ago, combining Cisco Unified Computing System integrated infrastructure and NetApp storage components. To date these products have earned more than $8 billion in combined revenue.

The new CI system, called FlexPod SF, is the first to use Cisco hardware for storage. It includes NetApp SolidFire all flash-storage, Cisco UCS B-Series servers, and Cisco Nexus switching.

“This is the first fully Cisco converged infrastructure platform,” said John Rollason, senior director of product marketing at NetApp. “The way we’re bringing that to market is a new NetApp [storage] node.”

All three components — storage, compute, and network — can be scaled up or down “on demand, within minutes,” Rollason said.

NetApp acquired SolidFire, an all-flash storage vendor, for $870 million in 2016. It soon began talking about a SolidFire-based HCI product aimed at hybrid cloud enterprise deployments.

Earlier this month the company moved into the cloud and hyperconverged market with its first enterprise-scale hyperconverged platform.“It delivers cloud-like infrastructure (consumption of compute, storage, and networking resources) in an agile, scalable, easy-to-manage four-node building block,” Rollason wrote in a blog post on June 5.

This means NetApp is now competing against established HCI vendors such as Dell EMC and HPE, as well as younger companies like Nutanix.

The new SolidFire-based system is designed for service providers and enterprise customers building next-generation data centers using a hybrid cloud model. This allows companies to keep some applications on-premise with others living in public clouds.

“This is the idea that customers, for their own data center, want to build their own architecture that mirrors what the cloud providers have,” said NetApp CEO George Kurian. “SolidFire is the backbone of the next-generation data center.”

The FlexPod SF systems will be available by the end of the month.