FlexPod Passes $3 Billion and 4,100 Customers

Cisco Systems, Inc. and NetApp, Inc. announced that the FlexPod integrated infrastructure solution has generated $3 billion in joint sales since its launch in 2010.

FlexPod unit shipments have grown 81% year-over-year, with demand for solutions now reaching a $2 billion annualized demand run rate.

By combining compute, networking and storage into a single system, integrated infrastructure provides the ability to dramatically improve the efficiency and agility of data center infrastructure, while reducing deployment risks. As a result, integrated infrastructure has emerged as one of the fastest growing segments of the IT infrastructure market, with Gartner estimating that the integrated systems market will grow at a CAGR of 56.3% between 2012 and 2016.

“Our partnership with Cisco on the FlexPod integrated infrastructure redefined how enterprises deployed private cloud infrastructure,” said Tom Georgens, chairman and CEO, NetApp. “As the data center extends to include public cloud services for better economics and infinite scale, NetApp and Cisco are again leading the way, helping customers realize the transformative business benefits of hybrid cloud.”

“As CIOs look to simplify IT and focus on delivering business outcomes, there’s been a major industry shift toward integrated infrastructure,” said John Chambers, chairman and CEO, Cisco. “In 2010 Cisco and NetApp launched FlexPod to deliver a more efficient, agile data center infrastructure to customers. Together, we’re evolving the FlexPod architecture together to help our customers unleash their applications and realize the promise of hybrid cloud environments.”

FlexPod Momentum:

• Worldwide Adoption: FlexPod is deployed with more than 4,100 customers and available in over 100 countries, an increase from 2,300 customers, and 70 countries last year.
• Channel Acceleration: Critical to the success of FlexPod has been its popularity with channel partners. The FlexPod global reseller ecosystem continues to grow with more than 1,000 channel partners qualified to sell and support technologies. These include 110 FlexPod Premium partners with the specialized skills to sell and support integrated infrastructure.
• FlexPod Roadmap: As businesses embrace hybrid clouds to rapidly and cost-effectively deliver business-critical applications and services, Cisco and NetApp are integrating technology into the FlexPod architecture, including Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and Cisco Intercloud Fabric, along with NetApp’s clustered DATA ONTAP, flash and cloud technologies.
• Ecosystem Innovation: Technology partners have also contributed to the success of FlexPod, with key companies such as Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, Citrix, F5, BridgeHead Software, Eaton, and Splunk, optimizing applications to run atop a FlexPod integrated infrastructure.
• Building on Success: Today’s news continues to deliver against the three-year plan announced by Cisco and NetApp in January 2013 to align technology roadmaps and address the next-generation cloud-integrated data center design. As part of this initiative, FlexPod will serve as the foundation for a virtualized, multi-tenant, cloud-ready data center.

U.S. Accounting Firm Attains 95% Faster Access to Customer Records:
Katz, Sapper and Miller (KSM) is one of the top Certified Public Accountant (CPA) firms in the United States. In the tax and accounting business, maximizing time spent on productive billing is a priority. With its data footprint growing at roughly 25% each year, KSM had outgrown its five-year-old IT infrastructure. FlexPod Premium Partner Logicalis Group recommended a complete data center reinvention based on a FlexPod platform with vSphere to improve performance and virtually eliminate downtime. Now, customer records are instantly searchable – taking less than threes to complete instead of two to three hours with the previous systems. It is a 95% reduction that has allowed KSM to improve its content management capabilities and deliver better customer service.

“In the tax and accounting business, maximizing time spent on productive billing is essential. Every second or hour of downtime can cost the firm hundreds and thousands of dollars,” said Darrell Williams, director, KSM’s information system department. “Not only were we impressed with the simplicity and performance of FlexPod but the integrated components have been a tremendous asset in helping us centrally manage all of our data center requirements. With FlexPod, delays, downtime and the costs associated with these problems are no longer an issue. Our attention is now on our clients, and not business issues.”

City Council Cuts Energy Bill, Improves Capacity by 50%
Salford City Council serves roughly 230,000 citizens from inner city, residential and rural areas of the Greater Manchester region in the northwest of England. The council houses one of the most advanced data center facilities by public sector standards, yet capacity constraints were beginning to appear. Employees were consuming data in new and different ways and departments were operating independently and deploying their own IT equipment. This fragmentation was leading to security and compliance issues. In response, Salford City Council transitioned their traditional data center to a community cloud based on FlexPod. This has enabled the Council to establish a foundation for the delivery of cloud services – increasing its server capacity by 50% and noticeably improving the speed and response of its applications – while reducing its energy bill by 50% to date. Salford City Council has also achieved a five-to-one reduction in data center space requirement, providing the council with room for additional revenue generating hosting services.

“FlexPod has enabled us to develop a multitenant community cloud platform providing services to the City Council, our partner organizations and SME companies in the local area,” said Jonathan Burt, corporate infrastructure architect, Salford City Council. “The validated design built on FlexPod has provided us with a platform to deliver secure Infrastructure as a Service and Software-as-a-Service offerings to different organizations throughout Salford, whilst reducing our internal costs to the City Council and supporting the local economy during significant cuts to our funding.“

German Stock Exchange Doubles Business Transactions
Based in Germany, Boerse Stuttgart AG is Europe’s stock exchange organization for private investors. Its main differentiator in the financial market is to execute orders with speed and cost efficiency. Their IT strategy and goals are aligned with these business requirements, with initiatives designed to deliver cost-efficient, reliable and fast service-delivery. With FlexPod, Boerse Stuttgart can now handle twice as many business transactions as before and even unexpected events like massive stock changes can be fulfilled with no influence on the quality of the service-delivery.

“As Europe’s leading stock exchange for private investors, it is crucial not only to execute retail orders as fast as possible but in a cost efficient way as well,” said Peter Litschel, Boerse Stuttgart. “A shared infrastructure based on FlexPod enables us to ‘bridge-the-cloud’ and focus on our core business. With more than one million tradable products we have to process a considerable quantity of trading data. We can now trust that our operation is efficient, fast and flexible. This allows us to focus on providing retail investors with the financial services they need.”

Rakesh Narasimhan, group VP and GM, desktops and apps, Citrix, said: “For over ten years, Citrix has been successfully partnering with Cisco and NetApp to help customers accelerate their journey to desktop and app virtualization and the cloud. The combined vision of Cisco and NetApp has enabled them to build a proven and industry leading converged infrastructure solution that has removed the complexity from technology, as shown in the Cisco Validated Designs. We look forward to continuing our close collaboration with Cisco and NetApp, and evolving the FlexPod infrastructure to help deliver a state-of-the art workspace that is mobile, virtual and secure.”

Garth Fort, GM in cloud and enterprise marketing, Microsoft Corp., said: “As part of the Microsoft Cloud OS strategy, we have collaborated with Cisco and NetApp for leading integrated infrastructure solutions powered by Windows Server Hyper-V. As FlexPod continues to evolve, Microsoft is excited to continue our work with Cisco and NetApp to help enterprise customers capitalize on the benefits and opportunities of cloud computing.”