Cisco Cisco UCS Director 5.5 Leaflet

Solution Overview

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Comprehensive FlexPod Management with Cisco
UCS Director

What You Will Learn

Today’s strategic discussion with chief information officers (CIOs) and IT managers is about business agility and

data center responsiveness. Organizations are shifting from siloed IT architecture models to converged

infrastructure solutions that preintegrate computing, network, and storage components. This approach can reduce

costs while enhancing an IT department’s flexibility and agility.

FlexPod is a data center solution jointly developed by Cisco and NetApp. Built on the Cisco Unified Computing

System

™

(Cisco UCS

), Cisco Nexus

fabric, and NetApp FAS storage, FlexPod was designed to deliver solutions

for both IT and business applications that reside in virtualized and nonvirtualized environments. It can also support

multiple workloads on all protocols to deliver long-term investment protection.

Challenge

FlexPod is a prevalidated solution, based on best practices, that helps reduce risk and engineering time while

supporting predictable service-level agreements (SLAs). Each infrastructure layer scales up or out to

accommodate workloads such as VDI, SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft without architectural changes. It also supports

secure multitenancy that adjusts to application or business isolation requirements in converged, virtualized, and

nonvirtualized environments.

According to a recent Forrester report

, the FlexPod platform did reduce risk, delivered a potential ROI of nine

months, and contributed to cost savings. However, FlexPod alone cannot deliver the full measure of flexibility and

agility sought by today’s dynamic data centers. The challenge is to find a way to increase flexibility and agility

while containing costs. The answer is a centralized automation and management solution that can further reduce

operational and capital costs and improve team collaboration, all of which enhances IT operating efficiency.

Solution

Cisco UCS Director is a integral companion for FlexPod because it allows holistic management through

centralized automation and orchestration from a single, unified view (Figure 1). When FlexPod and Cisco UCS

Director are combined, IT can shift time and focus from managing infrastructure to delivering new service

innovation. Used together, FlexPod and Cisco UCS Director deliver:

●

Enhanced IT agility with a prevalidated, unified architecture that easily scales up or out to large data-center

environments without design changes

●

Dramatically reduced capital and operating expenses through end-to-end management of the FlexPod

platform with real-time reporting of utilization and consumption based on trends set to customer-specific

time frames

●

Enhanced collaboration between computing, network, storage, and virtualization teams, allowing subject

matter experts to define policies and processes that are utilized when resources are consumed

The Total Economic Impact of NetApp’s and Cisco’s FlexPod Data Center Platform, January 2013.