Intelligent FlexPod management with Cisco Intersight

FlexPod® has been the de facto converged infrastructure platform for enterprise workload consolidation. Many customers rely on the proven reliability, scalability, flexibility, and innovations of FlexPod to support their mission critical applications. The ability to intelligently manage this valuable asset can have direct influence on your IT strategy and spending as well as business outcomes.

Corporations have steadily increased their reliance on advances in technology across all business operations to drive growth. Despite that, IT spending needed to manage the myriad of existing and new technology infrastructure has remained stagnant in most companies. For many customers, “Do more with less” continues to be the holy grail for IT management services.

In recent years, several IT management technology trends have been emerging. Intelligent operations, smart automation, and infrastructure-as-code are a few of them. These trends are gaining momentum as promising ways to increase IT efficiency, simplify user experience, and maximize the effectiveness of your infrastructure.

With that IT landscape in mind, let’s look at Cisco Intersight -- a software-as-a-service infrastructure management platform. It’s designed to simplify configuration and deployment of your IT infrastructure from a single pane of glass. You can initiate common operations from a centralized management portal to distributed environments across multiple geographic locations. The result is a major boost to IT productivity and user experience.

In my previous blog, we announced the Cisco Intersight integration with NetApp ONTAP® Storage. This integration brings the full value and simplicity of Intersight management service to the FlexPod environment. Enterprise SAN and NAS workloads can both reap the management benefits from the integrated Intersight and ONTAP solution.

To assist you in utilizing Cisco Intersight with FlexPod, we’ve recently published two Technical Reports to complement the Intersight product documentation and training materials provided by Cisco.

The first report, FlexPod Datacenter with ONTAP 9.8 and ONTAP Storage Connector for Cisco Intersight, provides step-by-step instructions on how to view your NetApp AFF and FAS storage systems and monitor storage attributes from the centralized Intersight dashboard. It also shows you how to initiate SAN and NAS storage workflows from Intersight, as well as how to create custom workflows to meet your specific needs.

Here are two examples of quick status checks that you can get on your NetApp storage systems:  Storage Array Utilization, and Storage Volume Utilization.

Another report, Cisco Intersight Managed Mode (IMM) for FlexPod, provides detailed information on how to use IMM to configure and deploy Cisco UCS servers in a few simple steps. After you set up a UCS profile, you can use it to deploy many other servers in a fast and efficient way.

Datacenter infrastructure management will always be crucial for organizations. Failure to properly manage it can lead to underutilizing your IT assets and even slowing your business progress. FlexPod, together with Cisco Intersight, is a major step forward to assist IT leaders make smarter decisions and contribute to the overall success of your companies.

For more information, please contact Carol Chan cchan@netapp.com

Here are some additional resources about FlexPod and ONTAP Integration with Cisco Intersight:

• FlexPod.com
• FlexPod transforming the way you do business
• Video - FlexPod Innovations and NetApp ONTAP Integration with Cisco Intersight
• Technical Report - Cisco Intersight Managed Mode for FlexPod
• Technical Report - FlexPod Datacenter with ONTAP 9.8 and ONTAP Storage Connector for Cisco Intersight
• FlexPod CVD