Solution Brief Keep Pace with Business Change by Modernizing Your IT Infrastructure Attain the flexibility and performance needed to handle the most demanding workloads

Today’s Business Requires Agility system. Organizations now have KEY FEATURES and Cost Efficiency access to a flexible, cost-effective Achieve Fast Response We have entered a new era in which architecture that meets or surpasses the with an Agile Infrastructure agility and cost efficiency are central performance, reliability, and availability Effortlessly support changing to business success. However, of current RISC/UNIX implementations. business requirements with organizations continue to struggle And with the strong industry backing a single, efficient, and agile with the pace, complexity, and changing and support of thousands of software infrastructure. demands of a data-driven world. And and hardware partners, organizations the limitations of aging infrastructure are now presented with a compelling Increase Business Value components, incompatible systems, argument to modernize aging RISC/ Through Efficiency and delayed availability of new appli- UNIX infrastructures and achieve the Deploy cost-effective solutions cation features on legacy RISC/UNIX® cost and productivity benefits needed for a new era of business-critical systems prohibit IT from achieving to meet their business goals. efficiency, performance, and productivity gains. In order to grow NetApp and Cisco help transform data flexibility. and stay ahead of the competition, centers with an agile infrastructure to businesses need to transform IT from Maximize Results drive cost and performance efficiencies a cost center to an innovation center. Without Disruption across critical application workloads. Eliminate planned downtime IT modernization Based on industry-leading platforms with continuous access to The growing adoption rate of the x86 and software and a unified architecture, applications and data. architecture as the industry standard the Cisco® Unified Computing System™ has created a gravitational pull on (UCS™), NetApp® storage, and the software developers and technology FlexPod® data center solution enable innovators. As a result, many commercial organizations to achieve an improved applications have been restructured total cost of ownership. By making the to take advantage of the improved transition to a modern infrastructure, IT economics of industry-standard is positioned to easily adapt to changing hardware based on the ® operating business requirements today and in the future. “In the past we needed at least 6 hours to deploy code out to our Web servers, as we were only able to make changes once a day. Today we use Cisco USC service profiles, NetApp rapid cloning, and our custom orchestration tool to deploy or update as many as 60 virtual servers in less than 30 minutes. And it’s all automated—we’ve replaced a complicated, mistake-prone, 100-step runbook process with push-button code deployments that are bulletproof and complete 92% faster.” Andy Lapin Chief Architect, Kelley Blue Book Company, Inc.

Achieve Significant Business • Enable predictable performance. • Meet service SLAs and reduce Benefits with a Modern IT Get the most out of database licenses operational cost. Streamline Infrastructure with improved performance from management with easy-to-use tools. IT can now realize productivity gains servers and storage that deliver Allow users to grow and shrink volumes by modernizing aging RISC/UNIX industry-leading benchmarks (Cisco: on the fly and enable allocated storage systems to dramatically reduce costs 1,609,186 (tpmC); NetApp: 1.5M to exceed physical storage. Gain and gain immediate access to new SPECsfs (IOPs). support for new, modern business applications and features. Through • Manage data efficiently. Streamline applications, such as those from application and infrastructure modern- the management of unstructured SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft. ization, organizations are positioned to and structured data, distributed Plan for Tomorrow with a Modern rapidly achieve business goals with the databases (both single-instance and Infrastructure Today ability to quickly respond to change, RAC) servers and storage, as well as disaster/recovery and Outstanding performance operate more cost efficiently, and and availability increase customer satisfaction. environments. The Cisco Unified Computing System Improved database TCO Ready access to new application (UCS) with intelligent ® Xeon® functionality Database licensing costs often represent processors delivers cost-effective a large part of the overall IT budget, Leading vendors are optimizing enterprise scalability, high performance, advanced and they are often the single largest software solutions for x86-based servers reliability, and the data protection that expense of infrastructure costs. By to capitalize on the outstanding perfor- businesses expect for their most data- modernizing the IT infrastructure, IT is mance when running on servers and intensive enterprise applications. Intel positioned to significantly reduce data- storage that deliver industry-leading Xeon processors are designed to meet base license costs, deliver predictable benchmarks. business performance needs, with reliability, availability, and scalability performance, improve availability, and • Reduce time to deploy and features equal to, and, in some cases, efficiently manage across a shared upgrade applications. Provide data greater than, current RISC processors. (physical or virtual) environment. mobility for seamless infrastructure Cisco UCS is the first truly unified data upgrades and maintain application • Dramatically reduce downtime. center platform that combines Intel performance integrity. Create an A highly redundant architecture Xeon processors with networking and insulation layer between applications maximizes the availability of storage access in a single cohesive and the underlying data infrastructure mission-critical workloads. Minimize system. Some of the world’s most for transparent upgrades, maintenance, database downtime when imple- successful companies, across a variety and hardware refreshes without losing menting upgrades, maintenance, of industries, have transitioned their access to data. and technology refreshes. Accelerate most critical business applications and • Maximize developer productivity. backup and recovery in a database database deployments to Cisco UCS. Add new applications quickly. environment. For example, with a You too can transform your mission- Accelerate application test and modern IT infrastructure it is possible to critical computing environment so that development up to 50% with copy an 8TB database in 108 seconds, it is ready for the challenges of both NetApp Snapshot™ technology occupying 2MB of additional space. today and the future. and cloning features. IT Modernization

Old New

Applications Application Deployment Applications (SAP, etc.) (new and upgrades) (SAP HANA, etc.)

Database Database Upgrades Database (Oracle 9i/10g) (Oracle 11gR2+)

UNIX O/S O/S Re-Hosting Linux O/S (Solaris, HP-UX)

RISC Server Server Refresh X86 Server (SPARC, PA RISC, Power PC) (technology migration) (Intel)

Storage Storage Refresh Storage (NetApp FAS, other storage) (migrate to DATA ONTAP) (NetApp FAS, E-Series)

Figure 1) IT modernization framework

Accommodate data growth with UNIX application migrations are not all • Achieve cost and performance flexible scale-out storage the same, proper planning and a sound benefits. Scale performance, capacity, NetApp storage solutions built on Intel migration methodology are required to and operations without the need to Xeon processors enable companies to help enable a successful migration. scale the number of people managing successfully handle the massive data the environment or sacrificing growth and infrastructure complexities Put an end to disruptive and complex performance. with scale-out storage solutions technology migrations with access • Future-proof your data center. optimized for today’s demanding work- to Cisco and NetApp expertise and Scale to large-scale data centers loads. By optimizing data management proven processes to successfully without architectural changes with at exabyte scale, organizations can migrate data from RISC/UNIX environ- an elastic, scalable, flexible pool easily adapt to changes in the business ments for a smooth production rollout of of compute, network, and storage with an immediate response to unpre- business-critical applications. Complete resources that can be put into action dictable data growth. Businesses get sets of services are available to help at any time. unprecedented agility, data protection, you confirm ROI and reduce TCO, and efficiency to manage their growing performance-test migrations, and Increase Business Value data with cost-effective storage solutions migrate applications based on your Through Efficiency that result in greater business value. criteria and requirements. Achieve flexibility and cost benefits IT modernization solutions from NetApp Achieve Fast Response with Make the transition with a and Cisco enable businesses to avoid prevalidated data center platform an Agile Infrastructure complex, costly projects with IT invest- FlexPod, jointly developed by NetApp Thrive in today’s state of constant change ments that extend the business value and Cisco, is a flexible infrastructure of critical business systems. IT is now IT modernization solutions from NetApp platform designed to ease your IT positioned to say yes to the business, and Cisco enable businesses to rapidly transformation with maximum efficiency using IT as the catalyst to deliver adapt to changing business conditions. and minimal risk. Components include measurable business value with IT is now positioned to make decisions NetApp unified storage systems, Cisco speed and efficiency. UCS servers, and Cisco Nexus® more quickly, bring products to market switches. The FlexPod architecture can faster, and drive revenue growth. And • Superior price/performance. scale up or out, and it can be optimized with the ability to operate with predict- Achieve flexibility and cost benefits for a variety of mixed workloads in ability in the face of extreme complexity, leveraging the outstanding perfor- both virtualized and nonvirtualized IT can effectively respond to evolving mance and economics of the x86/ environments. customer needs to drive both customer Linux architecture by replacing loyalty and sustainable profit. expensive, complex RISC/UNIX Make disruptive upgrades a thing platforms. of the past • Eliminate wasteful overspending. • Improved TCO. Power mission- Scale performance and capacity Undergoing a technology refresh can critical workloads with a shared IT by pooling several systems of any bring considerable benefits to your infrastructure that enables IT consoli- size to support numerous, diverse business. But the process can introduce dation and the potential for massive workloads that can be provisioned significant consequences if the transition cost savings by running numerous in minutes. is not handled properly. Since RISC/ workloads on the same hardware. IT Modernization

IT Modernization

Components Benefits

Cisco Unified Computing System Delivers a single, unified system based on Intel Xeon processors with automation to simplify and accelerate deployment of applications and services.

NetApp Storage Industry-leading unified storage platform for unprecedented levels of scalability and data storage flexibility to keep businesses running nonstop. Support for numerous workloads on all protocols leveraging existing resources and minimizing or eliminating technology replacement costs.

FlexPod Prevalidated base data center configuration built on Cisco UCS, Cisco Nexus data center switches, and NetApp FAS storage components. Optimized for a variety of mixed workloads in both virtualized and nonvirtualized environments.

Intel Xeon Manage and secure crucial business data and exceed the demands of the most mission-critical IT challenges with a powerful and reliable server featuring the Intel Xeon processor family.

Linux Ready access to new applications and functionality with the de facto standard operating system for x86 architectures.

Table 1) NetApp and Cisco IT modernization solution components.

• Consistent, repeatable deployments. • Gain data protection. Extensive NetApp and Cisco have a powerful Modernize business processes by reliability, availability, and service- global presence and have been working automating time-consuming, repetitive ability (RAS) features in silicon and together on a data center vision tasks to eliminate human error. Easily the storage subsystem provide error for almost 10 years. Built on jointly clone and redeploy resources to detection, correction, containment, validated reference architectures, our reduce preparation time for and recovery in all processors, memory, solutions have helped thousands of our new initiatives. and I/O data paths to protect against mutual customers to increase efficiency data loss. You also get the advanced and agility while reducing TCO. Maximize Results Without Disruption RAS features in Linux. Continuous access to critical • Achieve a highly redundant Visit www..com and business applications and data architecture. Standard redundant www.cisco.com for further information. IT modernization solutions from NetApp components provide the utmost and Cisco enable businesses to manage availability of critical data and About NetApp and secure business data with powerful mission-critical applications. and reliable servers and storage using NetApp creates innovative storage Intel Xeon processors. By eliminating Get Started Today and data management solutions that downtime, even during routine upgrades Now is the time to modernize IT deliver outstanding cost efficiency and and maintenance, technology refreshes, with an agile infrastructure based on accelerate business breakthroughs. and capacity and performance expansion, the Cisco Unified Computing System Discover our passion for helping IT is positioned to exceed the most and NetApp storage. These innovative companies around the world go demanding mission-critical IT challenges. solutions provide the flexibility, reliability, further, faster at www.netapp.com. and availability needed to achieve • Lose nothing. Protect and accelerate Go further, faster ® today’s business goals. By replacing the business with data protection aging RISC/UNIX infrastructure compo- solutions to reduce backup time, nents and incompatible systems, IT can speed data recovery, and improve achieve the productivity gains needed business operations. to rapidly adapt to change while achieving greater cost efficiency and increased IT agility.

© 2012 NetApp, Inc. and Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. Follow us on: No portions of this document may be reproduced without prior written consent. Specifications are subject to change without notice. NetApp, the NetApp logo, Go further, faster, Data ONTAP, FlexPod, and Snapshot are trademarks or registered trademarks of NetApp, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Cisco and Nexus are www.netapp.com registered trademarks and Unified Computing System and UCS are trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Intel and Xeon are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation. SAP is a registered trademark of SAP AG. Oracle is a registered trademark and Oracle 9i, 10g, and 11g are trademarks of Oracle Corporation. All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such. DS-3415-1212