If you work for one of the growing number global mid-sized businesses (100 – 1,000 employees), you know that it is critical to prioritize activities that contribute to growing the company’s revenue, acquiring new customers, and reducing costs – these are the main (some would say the only) priorities that matter! It’s not uncommon for employees at mid-size firms to wear multiple hats. As a result, very small groups of people are often responsible for the company’s entire IT operations (as a full time or just part of their existing job).
Common vision and key attributes of the Cisco, NetApp, and VMware collaboration.
In my experience these teams often don’t have time or resources to dedicate to complex, poorly integrated IT tools – in the same manner that we expect the electricity and water to “just work”, we expect the same of our IT solution – it must be simple (ie. integrated) & reliable (ie. always-on!).
Whether a mid-size business or enterprise, today’s IT is undergoing a transformation. Virtualization (through the creation of common server, network and storage resource pools) has exponentially enabled the wearers of “multiple hats” to more effectively and efficiently provision, deploy, manage and protect (think disaster avoidance & recovery) their IT.
In addition, exponential data growth, combined with power and space limitations and tight budgets, exert extreme pressure on IT responsiveness. This makes it increasingly difficult to quickly respond to the demands of the business (ie. grow revenue & acquire new customers) while still minimizing costs (And delivering optimized scalability, performance, and availability across all applications). The discussion is no longer about whether you’re going to virtualize; it’s about how and when you’re going to virtualize – your business and peace of mind depend on it!
Today, NetApp and Cisco announced the expansion of their partnerships with VMware with the introduction of an Entry-Level Flexpod for VMware, specifically designed to bring the proven Flexpod capabilities to mid-size IT environments.
Since its launch in Nov. 2010, we have seen more than 600+ enterprise customers trust their IT environments to Flexpod™ for VMware – now there is a right-size solution designed for mid-size business environments. Whether your IT priorities are focused on business continuity/disaster recovery, server consolidation, or implementing virtualization for the first time; Entry-Level Flexpod™ for VMware is a pre-validated solution that is simple and reliable – it delivers simplified management, enhanced resource efficiency, and protects your investment with a single unified future-proof architecture. This unified virtualized solution lets you effectively run everything from business-critical applications to company-wide virtual desktops.
It simplifies your path to IT as a service in ways that only VMware, NetApp and Cisco can deliver:
- One virtualization platform with VMware vSphere
- One consolidated server infrastructure with Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS)
- One converged data center fabric utilizing Cisco Nexus and 10GbE
- One unified storage architecture with NetApp FAS
- One common shared data center infrastructure to manage
VMware on Entry-Level Flexpod provides a complete virtualized datacenter infrastructure in a single rack!
Combining Entry-Level Flexpod with VMware’s Acceleration Kits including Virtualization and Management Products you have an ideal solution to get up and running quickly and efficiently. As your IT needs grow, you can add incremental Flexpod and VMware virtualization components into your Entry-Level Flexpod for VMware solution foundation.
For more information, go to here.
