Automate FlexPod Operations with Converged Systems Advisor

In Ranjeet Sudan’s recent blog post, he discussed how the FlexPod^® converged infrastructure has become a ubiquitous standard in data centers across the globe. For many enterprises, FlexPod is the trusted platform for their most demanding workloads and applications. With more than 170 validated designs and 250 person-years of joint engineering between NetApp and Cisco, FlexPod is now deployed in more than 9,000 customer sites.

For IT departments like yours, the rapid pace of service deployments and the demand for accelerated delivery make it difficult to maintain the infrastructure resources that you need to meet those demands. NetApp^® Converged Systems Advisor for FlexPod is a cloud-based management platform that can drastically simplify your FlexPod operations by automating validation, monitoring, and healing of your FlexPod converged infrastructure.

Simplify FlexPod Management, Increase Agility, and Reduce Disruption

You need a dynamic infrastructure that can quickly adapt to meet the changing needs of your business. With NetApp Converged Systems Advisor, your FlexPod infrastructure is configured, monitored, and validated according to best practices from day 1 and throughout your system’s lifecycle. Whether you have 1 or 100 FlexPod systems distributed across geographies, the Converged Systems Advisor cloud-based customer portal enables your teams to manage FlexPod from anywhere, with fewer resources and with greater agility. Converged Systems Advisor automates FlexPod lifecycle management, so your team can focus on driving business outcomes and can spend less time on managing your infrastructure.

The following screenshot of the Converged Systems Advisor portal shows the wealth of centralized information about a FlexPod system that you can get in a single view.

In the latest Converged Systems Advisor release, we expanded into new capability areas, introducing configuration healing and remediation. These new, active management capabilities enhance the business value that you get with FlexPod by automating fixes for common, yet time-consuming, configuration issues. With these capabilities, you are better equipped to handle potential issues before they cause service disruption. We plan to extend these capabilities in future releases of Converged Systems Advisor to further automate FlexPod deployments, upgrades, and scale-out operations.

Key Benefits of NetApp Converged Systems Advisor

FlexPod Monitoring. NetApp Converged Systems Advisor continuously monitors your FlexPod configurations. With comprehensive health checks and the ability to compare configuration states for root-cause analysis, Converged Systems Advisor protects against “configuration drift” and helps your administrators stay ahead of changes while improving business continuity The following figure shows how Converged Systems Advisor monitors your FlexPod systems and centralizes the information.

Configuration Healing and Remediation. When unanticipated configuration issues in your system arise, Converged Systems Advisor provides point-and-click remediation. Converged Systems Advisor helps accelerate problem identification and automates resolution. It detects potential issues, notifies your team when changes occur, and provides your team with automated “easy buttons” to speed time to resolution. The following screenshot shows an example of a remediation action that was automated by Converged Systems Advisor.

Configuration Assurance. Converged Systems Advisor enables continuous assurance of your FlexPod inventory, infrastructure, and software. With interactive views like the following, your administrators can look across your converged environment to easily assess availability, capacity, and virtualization configuration.

As your company adopts new business models and becomes a data-driven organization, your IT infrastructure needs to adapt quickly to the requirements of modern applications and business demands. NetApp Converged Systems Advisor for FlexPod builds on our commitment to helping companies like yours create business opportunities, enable new customer touchpoints through technology, and optimize IT operations.

To learn more about Converged Systems Advisor for FlexPod or to get started, see the following resources:

• NetApp Converged Systems Advisor for FlexPod lifecycle management video
• Converged Systems Advisor Datasheet
• FlexPod Converged Infrastructure home page

To see Converged Systems Advisor in action, visit the FlexPod booth during Cisco Live San Diego (June 9-13, 2019) in the World of Solutions.