FlexPod plus next-generation Cisco Unified Fabric: The leading converged platform gets even faster
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Carol Chan
Last month, we witnessed the successful launch of FlexPod® XCS from Cisco and NetApp®. This new integrated solution further extends the proven FlexPod converged infrastructure into hybrid cloud. You get an automated platform for modern applications and services across on-premises data centers, cloud environments, and edge locations. With Cisco Intersight, your IT team has full visibility of your distributed FlexPod assets from a unified dashboard. See launch highlights from Cisco and NetApp for more details.
Rethinking for innovation
In developing Cisco UCS X-Series – a major component of FlexPod XCS – the team heeded advice from Albert Einstein: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Cisco Vice President DD Dasgupta explains that with Cisco UCS X-Series, the team rethought everything and created a modular design to meet the needs of traditional enterprise applications and modern workloads.
What’s next?
Immediately after the FlexPod XCS launch, Cisco ramped up the pace of innovation with the release of next-generation Cisco UCS Unified Fabric technology and GPU enhancement for Cisco UCS X-Series. These new capabilities power FlexPod to accelerate performance for a wide range of data-intensive enterprise workloads. You can be confident that your IT infrastructure is future-proof for the next decade.
Cisco UCS fifth-generation Unified Fabric
The fifth generation Unified Fabric technology can deliver 100 gigabit per second (Gbps) bandwidth to enterprise data centers. You realize a major performance increase from the 40 Gbps bandwidth that the previous generation supported. And the modular FlexPod architecture makes it simple for you to adopt new Unified Fabric technology with no downtime. Your FlexPod systems can achieve 100 Gbps end-to-end performance with no interruption to your business applications.
Cisco UCS X-Fabric with Nvidia GPU node
The modular architecture of Cisco UCS X-Fabric is designed to support a broad range of workloads. By using UCS X-Series and X-Fabric, FlexPod delivers a scalable and flexible converged infrastructure that blends blade and rack servers into unified compute. Your IT team can quickly upgrade and expand your network seamlessly to meet new application requirements. And above all, you are ready for whatever connectivity innovations the future brings.
With the latest X-Fabric technology enhancement, you will be able to easily add GPU accelerators to your FlexPod environment to support data- and graphics-intensive workloads such as AI/ML, VDI, and big data analytics. Supported GPU options include Nvidia A100, A40, and A16.
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Carol Chan
Carol Chan is a Senior Product Manager for FlexPod. She joined NetApp in 2018 with 20+ years of enterprise experience. Prior to NetApp, Carol has led product management and marketing at multiple high tech companies including Dell EMC, VCE, Equinix, Sun Microsystems and HPE. Carol has a bachelor degree in Computer Science and MBA from Santa Clara University.
