FlexPod Continues Its Drumbeat of Innovation
Bruno Messina
Cisco and NetApp have a FlexPod partnership that spans nearly a decade. Over these years of collaboration, the FlexPod model has evolved to include a regular drumbeat of new technologies, innovations and solutions from both companies. This excellent timeline demonstrates a few of these areas of close teamwork.
The timeline reveals many different milestones all of which required commitment to FlexPod by both companies. Every day FlexPod customers see these benefits and have invested in FlexPod to serve over 9,500 cumulative customers and $12 billion in worldwide sales.
To illustrate how this close Cisco-NetApp teamwork delivers differentiated advantage for customers, a recent IDC survey of FlexPod customers found numerous bottom-line advantages that accrued to IT clients of all sizes. These survey benefits are proof from FlexPod customers of its unique overall value proposition and business value, including:
- 65% more time spent on innovation and new projects
- 61% improvement in application performance
- 60% decrease in number of unplanned downtime incidents
- 34% decrease in data center floor space
- 29% reduction in power and cooling
- 24% saved in software capex
These customer benefits are due to the close teamwork of Cisco and NetApp and continue to accrue to even better benefits as both Cisco and NetApp have added new innovations, solutions and applications in the past year.
One of the latest innovations to this 10-year heritage of collaboration is where FlexPod adds UCS Integration with Cisco Intersight. Cisco Intersight is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) infrastructure management platform that is augmented by other intelligent systems. It provides global management of the Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS) infrastructure. Intersight provides a holistic approach to managing distributed computing environments from the core to the edge.
Cisco Intersight can already be used by FlexPod customers today to monitor and manage their Cisco UCS environments, alongside UCS Manager. In fact, the latest FlexPod vSphere solution has a section specifically dedicated to Intersight as a part of FlexPod. In addition, NetApp offers a rich set of management tools for ONTAP that form a key part of the FlexPod management ecosystem, including NetApp Converged Systems Advisor, ActiveIQ Unified Manager and OnCommand System Manager.
In addition, Cisco and NetApp are taking the next step and are working together expanding FlexPod innovation and integrating ONTAP (specifically FAS and AFF platforms) and Intersight technologies. This ONTAP integration accesses ONTAP’s world-class file services in addition to NetApp’s block features. We will have more to say over the coming weeks and months as the Cisco’s Intersight integration with NetApp’s ONTAP moves forward.
The 10-year history of Cisco and NetApp is one of cooperation and co-development as illustrated by the 10-year timeline and enormous customer success. Stay tuned over the next few weeks and months as more cooperation and customer benefit will arrive for current and future FlexPod customers. The 10-year drumbeat of FlexPod solution, innovations, technologies and satisfied customers will continue.
Bruno Messina
Bruno Messina joined NetApp in 2018 and works in product marketing for FlexPod. His previous experience includes a career in product marketing of UCS servers for Cisco Systems and Solaris server marketing and competitive analysis at both Oracle and Sun Microsystems, where he joined in 2000. Bruno spent ten years in various roles of competitive analysis and product management at Sun Microsystems, leading analysis in both the workgroup and enterprise servers. Prior to Sun Microsystems, Bruno spent time finishing his MBA education and worked for two years at Cadence working on product marketing for both board-level and board timing tools. Bruno holds both a BSEE and MBA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.
