Cisco, NetApp Expand FlexPod Architecture

Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) and NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) are pushing their relationship deeper to extend the FlexPod architecture from branch office to public cloud.

“This is an expansion to create a unified architecture for branch offices, data centers and service providers,” said Jim McHugh, vice president of Marketing at Cisco. “FlexPod is the real hero here.”

The idea is to have one architecture that enables customers to move across different infrastructure scenarios, both physical and virtual, thereby simplifying the deployment and management of FlexPod-based environments, he said. To that end, the two companies are working together to better integrate Cisco’s Unified Data Center solutions, NetApp’s FAS storage systems and third-party technologies that work with FlexPod.

“We’re making FlexPod a consistent architecture that serves customers from the hundreds to the thousands, can scale up or down with no disruption and has one common structure and architecture for technology, deployment and support,” said Jim Sangster, senior director of Products and Solutions Marketing at NetApp.

What’s more, FlexPod now supports Cisco UCS Manager 2.1, UCS Central and the Cloupia technologies Cisco acquired when it bought Cloupia last year. “FlexPod been on the leading efforts for supporting UCS Manager and UCS Central and Cloupia,” McHugh said. “In fact, we’ve been using UCS Central to manage multiple domains both inside and outside the data center.”

For the service provider set, Cisco and NetApp are bringing together NetApp’s ONTAP and FAS storage systems with Cisco’s UCS and Nexus 7000 switches to create dynamically provisioned pools of server and storage resources. (Such a move makes sense — storage is to cloud environments as peanut butter is to jelly.) The combined architecture will use Cisco’s Virtualized Multi-Service Data Center architecture but will continue to support open source cloud computing technologies such as CloudStack and OpenStack, McHugh said.

Additionally, both companies will integrate Flash technologies at the host and storage levels to take advantage of the performance acceleration benefits Flash provides.

Branch offices, meanwhile, are the target for new capabilities in ExpressPod, the younger sibling of FlexPod suited for smaller environs — specifically, to meet the requirements of the converged infrastructure of FlexPod. The architecture can be configured for greater interoperability with the HQ data center to take advantage of virtualization and other cost-saving technologies, McHugh noted.

The enhancements to FlexPod offer an additional revenue stream for solution providers who have sold FlexPod only into enterprise environments, or for resellers who haven’t until now had an avenue to sell FlexPod, McHugh and Sangster noted.

“We hope to expand into other geographies with FlexPod, and as we expand we do tend to see an increase in interest from channel partners within certain areas of business — CloudStack partners, for instance. That’s been part of the overall history and increase we’ve had with FlexPod over time,” McHugh said.