Many organizations are rethinking their IT infrastructures and evaluating alternatives to cope with the new realities of today’s business growth and pace. There is a sense of urgency to move from a siloed environment to a shared IT infrastructure that is more efficient and flexible in addressing today’s rapidly evolving business requirements.

As part of their ongoing collaboration, Cisco, NetApp and VMware are offering a pre-sized, validated, standardized data center architecture design that is available through select joint channel partners. FlexPod for VMware helps customers accelerate their transformation to a virtualized, shared IT infrastructure with consistent and proven designs to simplify deployment and help reduce risk. FusionStorm’s data center experts can help customers take advantage of this new solution.

“Cisco and NetApp’s FlexPod is a pretested architecture that combines networking, computing and storage in a shared infrastructure that supports multiple applications and workloads,” said Tony Balistrieri, Vice President of Partner Strategy, FusionStorm. “Cisco and NetApp introduced the first FlexPod solution with VMware in November 2010, and the solution is now available through 120 qualified channel partners worldwide. As a longtime Cisco and NetApp partner, FusionStorm is pleased to be able to deliver this solution to customers.”

Flexible, Yet Integrated

FlexPod is a built on the Cisco Unified Computing System server platform, Cisco Nexus switches and NetApp unified storage systems running Data ONTAP. It is designed to lower deployment risk, increase data center efficiencies and accelerate and simplify customers’ transition to the cloud. It creates a shared infrastructure that scales to meet the changing requirements of growing data centers without disruption or the need to make architectural changes in the future.

“Integrated networking, computing and storage components are optimized for virtual data center environments and enable central management of an entire infrastructure — storage, compute, network and hypervisor,” Balistrieri said. “An open design management framework integrates with existing third-party infrastructure management solutions from vendors including SAP and VMware.”

Cisco and NetApp recently released new design guides that use the FlexPod design architecture in support of SAP applications. The design consists of SAP solution-based landscapes validated on the FlexPod shared IT infrastructure that help customers minimize application downtime to accelerate the deployment of SAP solutions in a virtualized environment.

The design allows customers to transition their existing or new SAP applications to a dynamic and flexible cloud-enabled environment. The FlexPod solution for use with SAP applications can support both virtual and physical configurations and scales up or down as required. For added security, customers can isolate different development or maintenance environments, or manage different production environments for SAP applications through the Cisco, NetApp and VMware Secure Multi-tenancy (SMT) Design Architecture design guide.

Cooperative Support Model

Cisco, NetApp, and VMware have built a new Unified Support Lab where support engineers can reproduce customer environments, diagnose issues and rapidly resolve customer cases. This further strengthens the global 24-hour cooperative support model that Cisco, NetApp and VMware developed to offer customers a streamlined response to identify and solve potential issues related to the FlexPod for VMware and Secure Multi-tenancy architecture designs.

“Many CIOs today are under increasing pressure to better align IT with the pace of business as well as reduce costs and maximize value. As a result, they are looking to make key architectural changes that will have significant business impact over the long term,” said Balistrieri.

“With our unmatched data center expertise, the FusionStorm team can help customers design and implement new platforms that help achieve greater flexibility and efficiency. FusionStorm and its key industry partners are helping customers transition to a shared IT infrastructure that will better position them to respond to business challenges and take advantage of new opportunities.”