Industry trends indicate a vast data center transformation toward shared infrastructures. Enterprise customers are moving away from silos of information and moving toward shared infrastructures to virtualized environments and eventually to the cloud to increase agility and reduce costs.
FlexPod™ is a predesigned, base configuration that is built on the Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco® UCS), Cisco Nexus® data center switches, NetApp® FAS storage components, and a range of software partners. FlexPod can scale up for greater performance and capacity, or it can scale out for environments that need consistent, multiple deployments. FlexPod is a baseline configuration, but also has the flexibility to be sized and optimized to accommodate many different use cases.
Cisco, NetApp, and VMware have developed FlexPod for VMware® as a platform that can address current virtualization needs and simplify their evolution to an IT as a service (ITaaS) infrastructure. FlexPod for VMware is built on the FlexPod infrastructure stack with added VMware components, including VMware vSphere™ and vCenter™ for virtualized application workloads.
3.5.1 Audience
This document describes the basic architecture of FlexPod for VMware and also prescribes the procedure for deploying a base FlexPod for VMware configuration. The intended audience of this document includes, but is not limited to, sales engineers, field consultants, professional services, IT managers, partner engineering, and customers who want to deploy the core FlexPod for VMware architecture.
3.5.2 FlexPod Architecture
The FlexPod architecture is highly modular or ―pod‖ like. While each customer‘s FlexPod unit might vary in its exact configuration, once a FlexPod unit is built, it can easily be scaled as requirements and demand change. This includes scaling both up (adding additional resources within a FlexPod unit) and out (adding additional FlexPod units).
Specifically, FlexPod is a defined set of hardware and software that serves as an integrated building block for all virtualization solutions. FlexPod includes NetApp storage, Cisco networking, the Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS), and operating system, hypervisor virtualization software in a single package in which the computing and storage fit as a cohesive pod. Due to port density, the networking components can accommodate multiple FlexPod. Figure 30 shows the FlexPod components.
Figure 30. FlexPod Components
The default hardware includes:
● Two Cisco Nexus 5548 switches
● Three chassis of Cisco UCS blades with two fabric extenders per chassis
Storage is provided by a NetApp FAS3210CC (HA configuration within a single chassis) with accompanying disk shelves. All systems and fabric links feature redundancy, providing for end-to-end high availability (HA). While this is the default base design, each of the components can be scaled flexibly to support the specific business requirements in question. For example, more (or different) blades and chassis could be deployed to increase compute capacity, additional disk shelves could be deployed to improve I/O capacity and throughput, or special hardware or software features could be added to introduce new features (such as NetApp Flash Cache for dedupe-aware caching for VDI deployments).
3.5.3 FlexPod Market Overview
3.5.3.1 The ChallengeDisruptive, inflexible transition from infrastructure silos
Today‘s IT departments are increasingly challenged by the complexity and management of disparate components within their data centers. Rapidly proliferating silos of server, storage, and networking resources combined with numerous management tools and operational processes have led to crippling inefficiencies and costs. Savvy organizations understand the financial and operational benefits of moving from infrastructure silos to a virtualized, shared environment. However, many of them are hesitant to make the transition due to potential short-term business disruptions and long-term architectural inflexibility, which can impede scalability and responsiveness to future business changes. Enterprises and service providers need a tested, cost-effective virtualization solution that can be easily implemented and managed within their existing infrastructures and that scales to meet their future cloud computing objectives.
3.5.3.2 The Solution
Unified, pretested, and validated shared infrastructure to simplify your data center transformation
To meet this challenge NetApp and Cisco have collaborated to create FlexPod™. FlexPod is a proven, long term data center solution built on a flexible, shared infrastructure that can scale easily; be optimized for a variety of mixed application workloads; or be configured for virtual desktop or server infrastructure, secure multi-tenancy and Cloud environments. FlexPod is a prevalidated configuration that delivers a virtualized data center in a rack composed of leading computing, networking, storage, and infrastructure software components.
Table 1. FlexPod Facilitates a Variety of Virtualized, Cloud Environments
3.5.3.3 NetApp: Unified Architecture for Extreme Efficiencies
Traditional storage solutions for virtualized infrastructures force you to buy separate systems to accommodate different storage needs. NetApp‘s multiprotocol unified architecture reduces cost and complexity by meeting all of your storage requirements with a single, highly scalable solution. You can further enhance efficiencies and save disk space with built-in deduplication, thin provisioning, and rapid cloning technology, which let you deploy thousands of virtual machines within minutes. Optimize performance with your choice of 10 Gigabit Ethernet or Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and boost availability with integrated Snapshot™ technology for space efficient backups and fast disaster recovery.
Innovative NetApp software integrates with major applications so you can automate key storage management, data protection, and security activities and manage storage from familiar application-centric interfaces. With the most flexible storage for server and desktop virtualization, you can increase storage efficiency and slash hardware and operational expenses in your cloud environment.