FlexPod on premises cloud: proven and trusted
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Carol Chan
Much has been said about the enormous benefits of hybrid cloud for enterprise businesses – agility, flexibility, scalability, TCO, and much more. FlexPod® hybrid cloud solutions are crafted to make sure that each customer’s data journey suits their IT strategy and pace of cloud adoption.
Even though the digital future is built on cloud, the majority of business workloads are still on premises. That’s true for many reasons, including mission-critical and legacy applications, highly sensitive data, company security policies, and government and industry regulations. The cloud costs associated with subscription fees, migration costs, internet bills, and so on are also important factors for a successful cloud strategy.
FlexPod hybrid cloud is enjoying unprecedented growth, and FlexPod Datacenter continues to provide a proven and trusted platform to power on-premises traditional IT and private cloud. With 2021 almost in the rearview mirror, let’s recap the key innovations that differentiate FlexPod from the other converged systems.
Cisco Intersight and NetApp ONTAP integrated management for FlexPod
Using this solution, IT can easily monitor the distributed FlexPod systems from a centralized Intersight dashboard with a click of a button. Many mundane tasks have been automated and streamlined, freeing up IT resource to tackle business challenges. For more information, watch the FlexPod Intersight demo.
New FlexPod hardware and software
With the newly released Cisco UCS M6 and X-Series servers, FlexPod brings unparalleled compute performance, scalability, and density to serve a broad set of enterprise and modern workloads. The advance data management capabilities of NetApp® ONTAP® 9 offer provide FlexPod customers a unified user experience across edge, core, and cloud environments. Furthermore, IT can now take advantage of the FlexPod end-to-end NVMe capability to gain additional performance and future proof I/O intensive workloads.
Here are the new Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs) to support UCS M6 and X-Series:
FlexPod deployment has been made a lot faster and simpler with the new Ansibles playbook. The playbook contains integrated Ansible scripts for various hardware and software components from Cisco, NetApp, and VMware. It’s thoroughly tested with validated FlexPod configurations. IT can also customize the automation playbook to meet their specific data center requirements.
FlexPod continues to expand the DR solution portfolio to provide customers choices. ONTAP provides a rich set of built-in data protection capabilities for local, remote and cloud environments. For business-critical environments, many FlexPod customers opt for NetApp MetroCluster for additional site failover capability. The failover operation is transparent to end users – there’s no data loss and no downtime. Read the FlexPod MetroCluster CVD for more information.
FlexPod has proven to be a versatile platform for many types of workloads. Instead of investing in a separate dedicated platform, many customers opt to leverage existing FlexPod systems to kickstart their company’s AI initiative.
Using Cisco Plus and NetApp Keystone, FlexPod certified partners can deliver a full stack converged infrastructure as a flexible consumption service. This solution offers customers a cloudlike experience on premises and serves as a bridge to the cloud.
We introduced the next-generation FlexPod earlier this year. More FlexPod solutions and services will become available in 2022 to further enhance on-premises data center capability and the user experience. Stay tuned for more exciting news to come.
Additional FlexPod resources
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.
