FlexPod’s Success and Technology Roadmap Point to a Bright Future

The integrated infrastructure segment continues to be one of the fastest growing IT markets. We recently highlighted that Cisco was the leader in the integrated infrastructure market with industry leading integrated systems built on top of Cisco UCS and Cisco Nexus. The FlexPod platform, jointly developed by Cisco and NetApp, is a leading solution in this segment.

The alliance between Cisco and NetApp has been rewarded with tremendous success. FlexPod has generated $3 billion in shared revenue since its inception in 2010 with a $2B annual run rate, making FlexPod one of the fastest growing solutions in Cisco and NetApp history.  In addition, FlexPod now has more than 4100 customers in over 100 countries being sold and supported by a network of 1,000 FlexPod channel partners.

How did Cisco and NetApp achieve so much success, so fast? Together, we integrated industry and market leading products, Cisco UCS, Nexus, and NetApp FAS storage, into a validated enterprise-class IT platform. We also jointly collaborated to produce greater than 50 validated designs covering a broad range of use cases, such as enterprise private clouds, virtual desktop infrastructure, databases, secure multi-tenancy, and business continuity. These validated solutions offer tremendous flexibility and choice by leveraging a broad ecosystem of hypervisors and application partners, enabling customers to quickly and confidently deploy infrastructure and applications while reducing complexity and risk.

New applications and cloud computing are placing new demands on IT infrastructure. Hence, the infrastructure needs to be capable of quickly responding to dynamic business priorities and changing market conditions.  To meet those requirements, Cisco and NetApp will continue to align our technology roadmaps to address enterprise customer needs by integrating our latest innovations into the FlexPod platform.

FlexPod will build on its foundation for business applications and next-generation solutions by implementing Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) into the FlexPod architecture with UCS Director to provide application centric programmability and infrastructure automation. UCS Director with ACI will enable customers to automate the provisioning of network, compute, and storage resources, both physical and virtual, that are required to support an application in the FlexPod architecture.

We also plan to incorporate Cisco Intercloud fabric into the FlexPod roadmap. By delivering uniform control across workload locations, FlexPod will be able to offer secure hybrid cloud-ready solutions that accelerate IT transformation while delivering dramatic improvements in operational efficiency and simplicity. Cisco’s pioneering enablement of workload mobility together with NetApp’s proven leadership in data management and protection will enable customers to rapidly, seamlessly, and securely manage their private, hybrid and public cloud environments.  With FlexPod and Cisco Intercloud Fabric, management of cloud enabled workloads will be centralized and optimized to fit the needs of the business.

Congratulations to the Cisco and NetApp teams for their momentum and stay tuned for new FlexPod solution announcements in FY15.