Cisco and NetApp, Inc. have marked five years of delivering unprecedented value to customers with FlexPod integrated infrastructure solutions.

The NetApp and Cisco FlexPod collaboration – has helped simplify and modernise enterprise IT so that organisations can achieve better business outcomes. FlexPod customers benefit from proven technology, a strong partner ecosystem and the ability to rapidly integrate new innovations. Customers and partners can choose from more than 100 validated application and infrastructure designs that increase productivity, speed decision making and produce stronger business results.

In its first five years, FlexPod has experienced incredible growth, generating shared revenues of $5.6 billion. Today, more than 6,300 customer organisations and 1,100 partners worldwide have experienced how FlexPod lets them reimagine what technology can do.

“Competition for customers is fierce. Requirements for responsiveness, availability and speed have never been higher. In FlexPod, Cisco and NetApp have created the ideal solution to meet these evolving business demands,” said George Kurian, CEO of NetApp. “The capabilities of Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite and NetApp Data Fabric enable customers to seamlessly extend their IT systems from the private cloud to the public cloud, on their terms. Customers can be confident that their investments in FlexPod today will enable their businesses to succeed and evolve with the changing business and IT landscape.”

“Cisco and NetApp share the same vision to empower every country, city and company to become digital. To do this, IT organisations need a simpler approach to deploy and manage infrastructure. Together, FlexPod and Cisco's partner network improve deployment time and prepare customers for the next wave of data center transformation,” said Chuck Robbins, CEO of Cisco.

Partners and Customers Share their FlexPod Experience

“As NetApp’s #1 FlexPod Partner for three years, ePlus has proven our success and expertise in designing, implementing and managing hundreds of FlexPods for our customers around the United States. Every day we hand-craft agile data centers and cloud solutions that deliver more to our customers.  With FlexPod’s amazing flexibility and the breadth of different workloads it already supports today, we’re excited about the next five years,” said Mark Melvin, chief technology officer of ePlus.

Patrick Goemaere, CTO of Virdata, a Technicolor Company, commented “Our solution uses a FlexPod private cloud infrastructure for easy, modular scalability for both hybrid and on premise solutions.  Running the NetApp Data ONTAP operating system, FlexPod gives Virdata a world-leading capability that eases capacity planning and that provides a validated reference platform. Virdata’s IoT and Spark-enabled big data analytics services can now also operate within a secure, multi-tenant environment that spans the entire hardware, network and storage domains.”

"Mercy built a state-of-the-art data center and implemented a flexible cloud infrastructure to effectively deploy and support an electronic  health record for storing and protecting patient information, and now for extending to smaller clinics and healthcare systems,” said Scott Richert, vice president of enterprise services at Mercy. With the help of the NetApp FlexPod architecture, we have saved over 40 percent of storage space, reduced power consumption by 50 percent, and now provide rapid access to and data protection for millions of patients.”  

“Specifically for the racetrack, we needed a small and lightweight system that can be easily flown from one place to the next. It had to be extremely reliable and deliver the performance required for demanding graphics applications. With our mobile FlexPod data center, we can implement this highly efficiently,” said a representative of Sauber Motorsport AG. “Without FlexPod, and with only conventional technology, a data center of this type would be extremely difficult to realise, and the cost of resources would certainly be higher.”

Expanding FlexPod Capabilities

Backed by one of the most successful alliances in the industry, FlexPod has quickly become the integrated infrastructure of choice for many of the largest enterprises around the globe. NetApp and Cisco, with their partners, continue to expand FlexPod capabilities to address new business requirements. 

FlexPod validated designs for Application Performance, Cloud, and Automation:

• FlexPod with NetApp All Flash FAS and Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) delivers increased application performance without downtime, driving higher productivity, operational efficiency, and smart decision making.

This design supports the entire software development lifecycle with easy, low-friction switching across flash, disk and cloud resources for infrastructure using Cisco ACI profiles and policies.

• FlexPod with Cisco ACI for Microsoft (Exchange and SharePoint) offers a simple, policy-based approach to application deployment. By automating layers of configuration that IT staff typically performs manually today, IT can deliver the resources that key business applications need in less time and with end-to-end enterprise-class security. 
• FlexPod for SAP Applications enables organisations to run multiple SAP HANA production systems in one FlexPod solution with less risk and greater flexibility. It also delivers the needed performance to run SAP applications servers and an SAP HANA database on the same FlexPod infrastructure.
• FlexPod for SAP Applications with Cisco ACI enables organisations to rapidly deploy SAP HANA based applications while also meeting the critical performance requirements.  Cisco ACI’s policy based approach delivers the required security and governance required by enterprises who are moving their enterprise applications to SAP HANA.
• FlexPod for SAP Applications with Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure Using Policy-Based Automation and Vnomic dramatically accelerates and simplifies the deployment and operation of large-scale SAP applications and SAP HANA database, helping to eliminate error-prone process, and aligning network behavior with application requirements.
• FlexPod with Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) Director and Cisco ACI automates workflows for rapid, no-touch, policy-based provisioning of application infrastructure. Cisco UCS Director coordinates the provisioning of both physical and virtual computing, networking, and storage components, reducing deployment time and helping to increase the pace of infrastructure delivery.
• FlexPod with OpenStack offers customers that are interested in tapping into the benefits of open source cloud economics, a simple way to quickly and reliably deploy OpenStack Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform (RHEL-OSP) cloud solutions. It is based on a proven and validated integrated infrastructure while offering the FlexPod Cooperative Support Model that provides both OpenStack and FlexPod support.

Making FlexPod Easier to buy, deploy, and own for Partners and Customers:

• FlexPod Services by Avnet One Frameworks is a new set of pre-configured and packaged converged infrastructure racks that combine products and services from Cisco, NetApp, and Avnet based on popular customer configurations.  These four new offerings provide reseller partners with a high-velocity sales motion for quoting and shipping pre-validated, pre-integrated FlexPod configurations.
• FlexPod Post Implementation Validation Tools provide partners and customer with steps to help confirm that their FlexPod solution is aligned with the Cisco Validated Design guidelines. Gaps are determined and recommendations are made for application firmware and configuration that ensure customer deployments are properly supportable.
• FlexPod Lifecycle Management provides the tooling, documented step-by-step upgrade procedure, and ongoing FlexPod software stack validations necessary to minimise business disruption and preserve the asset value of a FlexPod Datacenter investment.

Additional resources

• Learn more about FlexPod from Cisco and NetApp
• Find the FlexPod Five Year Anniversary Infographic here
• Follow NetApp on Twitter
• Follow Cisco on Twitter