Cisco Cisco UCS Director 5.5 Dépliant
Solution Overview
© 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
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Comprehensive FlexPod Management with Cisco
UCS Director
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
1
, 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
1
The Total Economic Impact of NetApp’s and Cisco’s FlexPod Data Center Platform, January 2013.