Cisco and NetApp today expanded the portfolio of the industry’s fastest growing integrated infrastructure and certified reference systems with a new offering uniquely designed for emerging business challenges.

The new FlexPod SF solution offers an ideal infrastructure for the data-intensive scale-out workloads that are critical to digital transformation. It features innovative NetApp SolidFire all-flash, scale-out, cloud-connected storage, Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) B-Series servers, and Cisco Nexus switching. The new solution can support enterprise and emerging architectures with precise storage capacity and performance tailored to the needs of individual tenants in multitenant environments.  

“Enterprise IT organisations face a dual challenge; they have to maximise performance and value from existing mission-critical workloads while adopting new technologies that can speed digital transformation,” said Eric Sheppard, research director, IDC. “The adoption of private cloud solutions offers an approach that helps them more easily transition to the future. FlexPod SF is a good example of an architecture that securely and seamlessly delivers workloads across cloud environments at scale and at cost.”

New features support fast-paced cloud environments

The new solution extends the FlexPod technology portfolio that has been deployed by over 8,400 global customers and 1,100 partners that serve 100 countries. Representing over 250 years of combined engineering experience, the portfolio has generated a total of $8 billion in combined revenue across Cisco and NetApp to date.

The new solution offers:
 - High-end predictable performance: Reliably run hundreds of applications on a single platform with guaranteed SLAs to independently set capacity and quality of service (QoS) at minimum, maximum, or burst performance levels across the entire infrastructure. FlexPod SF is built on Cisco UCS, which has over 120 world record benchmarks, combined with the dedicated performance of NetApp SolidFire storage. SolidFire offers the ability to remove 93 per cent of storage performance issues and remove “noisy neighbors” with SolidFire QoS.   

- Programmable agility: Seamlessly meet business demands with SolidFire software-defined architecture, simplified management, and scale by automating every aspect of provisioning, management, and reporting with 100 per cent programmable SolidFire storage and UCS B-Series servers. Cisco UCS compute offers up to 56 per cent faster time to market and the ability to deliver up to 59 per cent more business applications to end users. NetApp SolidFire storage also enables virtual machine (VM) deployment up to five times faster and provides granular “scale as you grow” capabilities with independent storage nodes.

- Scale-out value. Enable customers to align business expenses with business growth by reducing initial capital expenditures. This highly flexible solution delivers controlled performance at lower operating costs by allowing customers to buy only as much compute and storage as they need, when they need it. The FlexPod family of solutions delivers impactful savings of up to 46 per cent in lower IT infrastructure costs. FlexPod SF also offers cost savings through infrastructure consolidation, automation, and rapid application delivery.

“At Safelite, a leading provider of vehicle glass repair and replacement services, we serve up to 6 million customers every year. To continue offering our customers the best service possible, we needed a simple, highly scalable solution that would offer a superior customer experience and support our continued growth,” said Matthew Coy, vice president, Information Technology, Safelite Group. “The high-performance compute and next-generation storage of FlexPod SF provided us a strong foundation for our state-of-the-art claims processing center.”
 
“We’ve had great success in leveraging FlexPod to help our customers address their business requirements and achieve operational efficiency, cost savings, and overall success,” said Jerry McIntosh, senior vice president, Advanced Technology, ePlus. “We’re excited for the opportunity to expand our reach to cloud and virtualization buyers with FlexPod SF.”
 
“To help businesses capitalise on their digital transformation, IT needs a new kind of cloud infrastructure that is simply, agile, and performs predictably as application requirements rapidly change,” said Satinder Sethi, vice president, Data Center Solutions, Cisco. “FlexPod SF offers a prevalidated, next-generation software–defined, converged architecture solution that customers can deploy with confidence to meet their transformational goals.”

“Data is at the heart of business success in the digital era. Together, Cisco and NetApp offer a family of solutions that give organizations access to the full value of their data for competitive advantage,” said Brett Roscoe, vice president, Products, Solutions, and Services Marketing, NetApp. “FlexPod SF helps customers maximise that value with a new kind of converged infrastructure that easily scales, performs predictably, and offers better economics.” - TradeArabia News Service