User guide

© 2011 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Cisco Validated Design Page 40
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Three chassis of Cisco UCS blades with two fabric extenders per chassis
Storage is provided by a NetApp FAS3210CC (HA configuration within a single chassis) with accompanying disk
shelves. All systems and fabric links feature redundancy, providing for end-to-end high availability (HA). While this
is the default base design, each of the components can be scaled flexibly to support the specific business
requirements in question. For example, more (or different) blades and chassis could be deployed to increase
compute capacity, additional disk shelves could be deployed to improve I/O capacity and throughput, or special
hardware or software features could be added to introduce new features (such as NetApp Flash Cache for
dedupe-aware caching for VDI deployments).
3.5.3 FlexPod Market Overview
3.5.3.1 The Challenge
Disruptive, inflexible transition from infrastructure silos
Today‘s IT departments are increasingly challenged by the complexity and management of disparate components
within their data centers. Rapidly proliferating silos of server, storage, and networking resources combined with
numerous management tools and operational processes have led to crippling inefficiencies and costs. Savvy
organizations understand the financial and operational benefits of moving from infrastructure silos to a virtualized,
shared environment. However, many of them are hesitant to make the transition due to potential short-term
business disruptions and long-term architectural inflexibility, which can impede scalability and responsiveness to
future business changes. Enterprises and service providers need a tested, cost-effective virtualization solution
that can be easily implemented and managed within their existing infrastructures and that scales to meet their
future cloud computing objectives.
3.5.3.2 The Solution
Unified, pretested, and validated shared infrastructure to simplify your data center transformation
To meet this challenge NetApp and Cisco have collaborated to create FlexPod™. FlexPod is a proven, long term
data center solution built on a flexible, shared infrastructure that can scale easily; be optimized for a variety of
mixed application workloads; or be configured for virtual desktop or server infrastructure, secure multi-tenancy
and Cloud environments. FlexPod is a prevalidated configuration that delivers a virtualized data center in a rack
composed of leading computing, networking, storage, and infrastructure software components.