Everything You Need to Know About the Cisco FlexPod Solution

Everything You Need to Know About the NetApp and Cisco FlexPod Solution

Platform for Innovation. Unmatched Versatility. Trusted Worldwide.

FlexPod from Cisco and NetApp delivers best-in-class converged infrastructure solutions that support enterprises and enable service providers with a versatile and trusted global platform for innovation.

What is FlexPod?
Digital Transformation with FlexPod
FlexPod for Hybrid Cloud
FlexPod for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Solutions
AI and Machine Learning
SAP
How Island Networks Can Help
Get Started

What is FlexPod?

Built on Cisco and NetApp technology, the FlexPod solution is a converged infrastructure platform composed of prevalidated storage, networking and server technologies. FlexPod increases IT responsiveness to organizational requirements and reduces computing costs with maximum uptime and minimal risk. It is trusted worldwide by over 9,000 customers using more than 170 validated designs.

9000

Over 9,000 Customers

170

More than 170 Validated Designs

FlexPod integrates components that scale, compute and store independently. This means you can meet changing, granular business requirements for a broad set of applications and demands. Prevalidated FlexPod architecture delivers application performance and agility that drive higher productivity, faster decision-making and more significant growth opportunities.

The FlexPod portfolio includes FlexPod Datacenter for core enterprise data centers and service providers, FlexPod Express for medium-sized businesses and branch offices, and FlexPod Select for data-intensive workloads. The portfolio is validated with leading hypervisors, operating systems, systems management tools and cloud management platforms.

Digital Transformation with FlexPod

As your enterprise strives for digital transformation and operational efficiency, you need technology to support dramatic shifts across the organization. That means simplifying IT and reducing costs while being responsive to changing market conditions and business needs.

FlexPod is the hybrid cloud platform built for the changing landscape and the future of IT. It enables you to optimize the data center for your most demanding applications and gives IT the capacity for innovation.

FlexPod delivers a trusted, global platform for innovation, with unmatched versatility. Its best-in-class converged infrastructure solutions support enterprises and enable service providers to:

Power the most demanding AI needs with an optimized infrastructure.
Integrate advanced cloud services with the only hybrid, multi-cloud CI stack.
Manage data easily from edge to core to cloud.
Dramatically reduce data center costs, streamline IT and simplify support.
Operate with confidence and meet the needs of diverse workloads.

FlexPod for Hybrid Cloud

FlexPod is cloud-capable, providing the flexibility needed to power the journey to the cloud. Move workloads back and forth from on-premise to cloud storage, and leverage the top cloud providers to create a secure, robust and dependable hybrid cloud solution that grows with your enterprise.

Customers demand a flexible hybrid cloud strategy from their technology providers that meets them wherever they are on their cloud journey. As hybrid cloud strategies mature, companies realize that the path to the cloud is not a one-way street. Workloads must be able to move back and forth from on-premise to the cloud and between cloud providers. FlexPod provides the foundation for a flexible hybrid cloud strategy, enabling simple orchestration between on-premise environments and your cloud provider.

Fully Flexible Hybrid Cloud Solutions

FlexPod provides complete data center architecture, including compute, network and storage on which you can run a variety of workloads with confidence. With multiple reference architectures to work from, you’ll have the documented design and deployment guidance along with the support you need to implement a flexible strategy that maximizes both your onsite storage and cloud provider services.

Download FlexPod’s Private Storage Design Guide

Download

FlexPod for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Solutions

Innovative, Scalable, Trusted Platform for VDI

FlexPod allows you to scale your virtualized environments without limits through rapid provisioning, scale-on-demand architecture, high capacity compute power and high-density storage. Reduce both operational and capital costs while you remain agile to meet the changing demands of your business.

Virtualized environments enable IT to quickly provision new users, maintain compliance across desktops and servers, and scale on demand. FlexPod is purpose-built for virtualized and VDI environments that enable enterprise workloads to function seamlessly at scale, with a superior end-user experience. FlexPod allows businesses to scale globally with easy configuration and management while reducing both operational and capital costs.

ESG Economic Validation Report – How FlexPod Delivers Robust Remote VDI Solutions

A new report from ESG reveals the value of FlexPod converged infrastructure for VDI workloads. Learn how customers enable access to virtual desktops and applications anywhere, anytime while improving application performance and lowering operational costs.

Download the Report

Learn More

AI and Machine Learning

Success in machine learning depends on a combination of precision floating-point performance, dense storage capacity and powerful processing speed all wrapped up in a platform that’s easy to deploy and manage.

FlexPod provides precision floating-point performance and dense storage capacity to scale on-demand while simplifying management and enhancing data access. It combines best-in-class compute, network and storage in a single cabinet that lets you scale each component independently while never missing a beat in your processing.

The FlexPod Datacenter for AI solution is fully equipped to power your AI, ML and DL workloads and databases. By deploying this highly scalable architecture, your organization can take advantage of built-in technology advancements and a unified management approach to achieve many IT and business benefits. The solution integrates with Kubeflow Pipelines to foster collaboration across multiple private and public cloud platforms and provide broad access to AI capabilities.

Enhanced Data Access and Management

As an ML expert, your data is critical to your success; you can’t afford to lose access to a single file or line of code. Cisco ACI can easily create secure infrastructure architectures. NetApp ONTAP and the NetApp Data Fabric allow you to access data from any location, including the cloud. This increases your ability to work with real-world data sets while maintaining snapshots, mirrors and clones that reduce latency and provide easy version control.

Built for Efficiency

You have a lot of real-world data to process, and you can’t waste time worrying about your infrastructure. FlexPod offers significant physical efficiencies that result in direct savings on power, cooling and data center footprint while minimizing the need for hands-on management. With FlexPod in your data center, you’ll avoid bottlenecks that waste system resources, and you’ll save time, energy and money by running a solution that operates at peak performance without ongoing management or tuning.

Learn More

SAP

Your enterprise depends on SAP and SAP HANA to respond to changing business needs. With FlexPod as your SAP foundation, you’ll get fast provisioning, cloning and refresh on a flexible, agile solution that simplifies your SAP implementation by providing a single point of management.

Digital transformation is reshaping everything businesses do, including adopting new business models and simplified IT infrastructures that can scale and adapt to the requirements of mission-critical applications like SAP. FlexPod is a leader in converged data center architectures that provide a single point of management with Cisco Intersight while allowing you to scale each component on demand and respond to changing business needs.

With capabilities for replication, fast provisioning, cloning and refresh processes, FlexPod is an excellent foundational infrastructure for SAP. FlexPod is flexible and agile enough to support either traditional SAP HANA deployment, SAP HANA as a service or SAP with a third-party database. With FlexPod’s storage provisioning, performance, computing and scaling capabilities, you can add value and insight to your data. Stay on-premises with your data, or move to the hybrid cloud whenever and wherever you want. FlexPod is hybrid-cloud ready.

How Island Networks Can Help

At Island Networks, we implement innovative IT solutions to customers around the world. We work in partnership with leading hardware, software and cloud providers that support your organization’s goals. Most importantly, we work alongside you as members of your IT team to support your business goals.

Learn how our team of experts can help you succeed with FlexPod. Book a consultation with us today.

Book a Consultation

About Cisco

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide technology leader that has been making the internet work since 1984. Their people, products and partners help society securely connect and seize tomorrow’s digital opportunity today.

About NetApp

NetApp is the data authority for the hybrid cloud. They provide a full range of hybrid cloud data services that simplify the management of applications and data across cloud and on-premise environments to accelerate digital transformation.