Customers Gain Greater Flexibility, Choice and Affordability with a New Series of Pre-Validated Design Architectures and Validated Management Solutions from Leading Vendors
To help more customers accelerate their transition to the cloud, Cisco and NetApp today announced plans to extend the FlexPod with a series of new pre-validated design architectures priced and sized for smaller workloads. This new FlexPod series is built on a flexible, scalable, shared infrastructure that combines computing, networking and storage solutions from Cisco and NetApp. Additionally, to simplify and accelerate implementation of cloud automation capabilities, Cisco and NetApp have also validated several new management solutions from leading software management vendors for all FlexPod design architectures.
Highlights/ Key Facts
- Offering price and scale that’s sized for business application workloads with 500 to 1000 users, the entry-level FlexPod solution allows customers to invest only in the infrastructure they require and allow for simple and rapid scaling to meet growing demands as their business needs change.
- Customers gain investment protection with the new entry-level FlexPod solution, which easily scales to larger enterprises by simply adding incremental capacity, as their needs grow for larger application workloads.
- The entry-level FlexPod combines for the first time the NetApp entry level FAS 2240 and the Cisco UCS C-Series Cisco Nexus 5000 Switches, Cisco Nexus 2232 Fabric Extender, and Cisco UCS 6200 Series Fabric Interconnects.
- Similar to other FlexPod pre-validated solutions, this entry level FlexPod provides greater flexibility and customer choice, supporting multiple hypervisors and business applications to help accelerate deployment of private clouds.
- Since Cisco and NetApp first announced FlexPod in November 2010, it has grown to become an extremely popular converged infrastructure platform. FlexPod is available worldwide through more than 500 FlexPod partners and more than 850 customers are using FlexPod for their data center infrastructure – representing more than 400% growth in customer adoption in less than a year.
Flexible Management Options
- Cisco and NetApp offer customers greater flexibility and choice in how they manage their FlexPod solution. Management options include:
- Validated FlexPod management solutions which provide unified, turn-key functionality for automation and orchestration. These solutions have passed extensive testing in Cisco and NetApp labs against a broad set of functional and design requirements. Solutions available today include products from CA Technologies, Cloupia, and Gale Technologies.
- In addition, customers can also maximize their investment in existing management tools by managing their solution via open APIs, Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud, VMware vCloud® Director or VMware vCenter Server.
