Infrastructure Solution FlexPod for VMware Accelerate your transition to the cloud with a prevalidated infrastructure solution

The Challenge existing infrastructures and that scales Key features Disruptive, inflexible transition from to meet their future objectives. • Reduce business risk and infrastructure silos time to deployment for all your applications with prevalidated, Today’s IT departments are increasingly THE SOLUTION challenged by the complexity and standardized components and Unified, pretested, and validated management of disparate components cooperative support and services shared infrastructure to simplify your from Cisco, NetApp, and VMware within their data centers. Rapidly proliferating silos of server, storage, transformation • Increase efficiency and decrease and networking resources combined To meet this challenge NetApp and costs with a simplified shared, with numerous management tools Cisco have collaborated to create virtualized infrastructure that and operational processes have led to FlexPod™ for VMware. FlexPod is a increases asset utilization and crippling inefficiencies and costs. proven, long term data center solution integrates into your existing built on a flexible, shared infrastructure environment Savvy organizations understand the that can scale easily; be optimized for financial and operational benefits of • Improve IT agility and protect your a variety of mixed application work- moving from infrastructure silos to technology investment with a flex- loads; or be configured for virtual a virtualized, shared environment. ible, unified infrastructure stack desktop or server infrastructure, secure However, many of them are hesitant that is built for virtualization today multi-tenancy and Cloud environments. to make the transition due to potential and will scale to a fully private or FlexPod is a prevalidated configuration public cloud tomorrow short-term business disruptions and that delivers a virtualized data center in long-term architectural inflexibility, a rack composed of leading computing, which can impede scalability and networking, storage, and infrastructure responsiveness to future business software components. changes. Enterprises and service providers need a tested, cost-effective FlexPod for VMware virtualization solution that can be easily FlexPod differs from other implemented and managed within their virtualization offerings by providing: • Validated technologies from industry leaders in computing, storage, networking and server virtualization “The Cisco, NetApp, and VMware infrastructure is a game changer. We can run our entire business on an integrated and verified platform that we deployed in our data center in just a matter of hours. This infrastructure is where everybody’s going to be in 2012, but we’re already here.”

Brian Denton CTO, ExamWorks

• A single platform, built from unified • Capacity and data center sizing and scale out one or more FlexPod computing, fabric, and storage • Identification of operations and configurations to meet the following technologies, that lets you scale provisioning requirements requirements: to meet the largest data center requirements without disruption or As a result, you can understand and • Migration to a shared infrastructure architectural changes in the future better predict the exact power, floor with many applications • Integrated components that enable space, usable capacity, performance, • Improved agility to meet growth and you to centrally manage all your and cost for each FlexPod deployment. key critical business initiatives • Lower cost per user without infrastructure pools FlexPod for VMware can support a sacrificing scalability • An open design management number of mixed workload environ- framework that integrates with your ments, and it can be optimized for your • Simplified operating skills and existing third-party infrastructure specific requirements. For example, a processes and reduced costs management solutions base FlexPod configuration can support • Evolution to operations that align 1,500 users for these four popular with ITIL-based standards Investment protection with workloads simultaneously: virtual • Deployment of dedicated applica- standardized, flexible IT desktop infrastructure (VDI), ® tions that support software as a Together, NetApp, Cisco, and Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint®, and service (SaaS), VDI, and other cloud VMware provide a unified flexible SQL Server® and it provides sufficient environments architecture that is ready for virtualized headroom for additional workloads. Medium-sized enterprises and cus- environments today, yet is flexible FlexPod comes with a sizing guide that tomers with more moderate growth enough to grow at your own pace to a shows you how to flex the solution to requirements can use FlexPod as a fully private cloud. The Ethernet-based meet your specific requirements for starting point for virtualization solutions. FlexPod framework fits right into your other workload environments. They can then scale up storage and current infrastructure, eliminating the cost compute pool capacity or performance of replacing your existing technology. Scalability for any cloud solution within a FlexPod configuration while FlexPod configurations can be right- FlexPod components are integrated maintaining centralized management of sized up or out, and then duplicated and standardized to help you achieve the infrastructure solution. in modular fashion to fit your specific timely, repeatable, consistent deploy- organizational needs. For example, ments and eliminate guesswork from large enterprises or service providers the following areas: with mature IT processes and rapid • Resource procurement and planning growth expectations can deploy Environment Examples Capabilities Exchange 2010, Microsoft SharePoint, • Start with the FlexPod predesigned, simple, validated data center solution to run on a or SQL Server variety of application workloads • Data center efficiency • Virtualized shared infrastructure Virtual desktop infrastructure • Deduplication of images • Rapid provisioning through VM cloning • Array-based data protection Development/production • Space-efficient cloning of datasets and VMs • Data center efficiency • Dynamic infrastructure • Add ITSM and vCloud orchestration for self-service portals • Virtualized shared infrastructure • Optional to add secure multi-tenancy architecture for secure portioning and isolation • Array-based data protection Internal private IaaS cloud/secure • Add secure multi-tenancy architecture for secure partitioning and isolation of workloads multi-tenancy • Add ITSM/orchestration for automated provisioning, workflows, usage metrics, and reporting Service provider • Data center efficiency • Dynamic infrastructure for SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS • Add secure multi-tenancy for secure partitioning and isolation of client environments

Table 1) FlexPod facilitates a variety of virtualized, cloud environments.

Best-in-class components and be segmented into securely isolated ties and manage storage from familiar features partitions that deliver specific service application-centric interfaces. With the levels for applications, business units, most flexible storage for server and Leading components from VMware, or customers. desktop virtualization, you can increase Cisco, and NetApp include: storage efficiency and slash hardware NetApp: unified architecture for • VMware® vSphere™, vCenter™ and operational expenses in your cloud extreme efficiencies • Cisco Unified Computing System™ environment. and Cisco Nexus® family switches Traditional storage solutions for virtual- Cisco: unified computing for simplified ® ized infrastructures force you to buy • NetApp FAS and complete bundle connectivity separate systems to accommodate Features include: different storage needs. NetApp’s mul- The Cisco Unified Computing System tiprotocol unified architecture reduces (UCS) is a data center platform • Performance-matched stack cost and complexity by meeting all specifically designed for virtualized • Step-by-step deployment guide of your storage requirements with a environments. The Cisco® United • Detailed application sizing guide single, highly scalable solution. Computing System unites computing, • Support for multiple classes of networking, and storage connectivity computing and storage in a single You can further enhance efficiencies and virtualization into a single cohesive FlexPod deployment and save disk space with built-in system. It’s designed to eliminate time- deduplication, thin provisioning, and • Centralized management: VMware consuming manual integration, reduce rapid cloning technology, which let you vCenter with Cisco Unified total cost of ownership (TCO), and deploy thousands of virtual machines Computing System and NetApp dramatically increase business agility. within minutes. Optimize performance FAS plug-ins with your choice of 10 Gigabit Ethernet The Cisco United Computing System FlexPod enables a wide range of or Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) integrates computing resources with virtualization applications and cloud and boost availability with integrated Cisco Nexus switches and a unified solution environments “out of the box.” Snapshot™ technology for space- I/O fabric that provides an intelligent You can also add optional software efficient backups and fast disaster method for identifying and handling to transform FlexPod into a highly recovery. different types of network traffic. You available infrastructure that provides can consolidate all traffic onto a single Innovative NetApp software integrates mobility at all layers for nonstop opera- high-performance, highly available 10 with major applications so you can tions. FlexPod can even expand into a Gigabit Ethernet network to greatly automate key storage management, secure multi-tenancy environment that simplify network management and data protection, and security activi- enables your shared infrastructure to reduce costs. The Cisco® United Computing System tralized management of the NetApp, respectively, NetApp, Cisco, and Manager interface also provides Cisco, and VMware technology VMware have a powerful global pres- service profile templates that let you elements. VMware vCenter provides ence and have been working together automate large-scale server and a central framework for managing on a shared virtualized data center application deployments based on pre- FlexPod resources as virtualized data vision since 2003. Our collaboration defined policies to deliver a stateless center pools. Both NetApp Virtual has resulted in more efficient virtual- computing environment. Storage Console and Cisco United ization and cloud computing solutions Computing System integrate with and numerous jointly validated refer- VMware: setting the standard for VMware vCenter to enable well-coor- ence architectures. Together we have server and desktop virtualization dinated management across server, helped thousands of mutual customers The powerful VMware virtualization fabric, and desktop layers. improve agility and lower costs. solution enables you to pool server NetApp storage integration includes Open delivery ecosystem and desktop resources and dynami- VMware vCenter plug-ins and supports cally allocate them with service-level You can choose from a broad net- VMware vStorage APIs. This tight inte- automation so you can deploy a pri- work of world-class solution delivery gration greatly improves productivity by vate cloud and deliver IT as a service partners to implement FlexPod for enabling your virtualization infrastructure (ITaaS). VMware components provide VMware. These partners understand administrators to directly perform stor- a scalable approach to virtualization your business requirements and are all age and data management operations that delivers high availability and certified and trained on NetApp, Cisco, using VMware vCenter without requiring agility to meet your changing business and VMware as well as complementary storage administrator assistance. requirements. technologies to deliver a complete cloud The open FlexPod architecture also solution that fits your business needs. VMware vSphere, the industry’s most provides APIs that enable IT service complete and robust virtualization Getting started management using your existing platform, increases IT efficiency third-party infrastructure management To learn how FlexPod enables you to through consolidation and automation, solutions. build a flexible and efficient shared dramatically reducing your capital and infrastructure today as your foundation operating costs while giving you the Cooperative support for rapid for future-ready IT, contact your local freedom to choose your applications, resolution data center partner. OS, and hardware. Our cooperative support model VMware vCenter Standard offers proac- provides a more streamlined response ABOUT NETAPP tive end-to-end centralized management from Cisco, NetApp, and VMware to NetApp creates innovative storage of virtual environments, delivering the identify and rapidly resolve problems. and data management solutions that visibility and responsiveness you need Global 24-hours-a-day support provides deliver outstanding cost efficiency and for cloud-ready applications. expert technical support when needed. accelerate performance breakthroughs. Discover our passion for helping com- Centralized management Proven partnership panies around the world go further, A critical advantage provided by As industry leaders in storage, net- faster at www.netapp.com. FlexPod for VMware is the built-in cen- working, and server virtualization,

© Copyright 2010 NetApp, Inc. All rights reserved. No portions of this document may be reproduced without prior written consent of NetApp, Inc. NetApp, the NetApp logo, Go further, faster, FlexPod, and Snapshot are trademarks or registered trademarks of NetApp, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Microsoft, SharePoint, and SQL Server are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. VMware is a registered trademark and vCenter and vSphere are trademarks of VMware, Inc. Cisco and Cisco Nexus are registered trademarks and Cisco Unified Computing System is a trademark of Cisco Systems, Inc. All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be www.netapp.com treated as such. DS-3105-1110