Check out the great conversation I had with Abhinav Joshi of Cisco and Joe Onisick of WWT around our partnership, FlexPod, SMT, Automation, CVDs, and enabling partners. Thanks to Didier Rombaut of Cisco and Friea Berg of NetApp for bringing us together for this conversation.
Feeling inspired by a conversation over lunch on day 1 of Cisco Live with Walz Group Chief Information Security Officer Bart Falzarano. In just 20 minutes Bart outlined not just his company’s architecture today but their decision process for and logic behind evolution to cloud. Our conversation started with a discussion about how a couple years ago exponential growth - combined with consistent failures on key platforms running on bare metal – started having a significant impact this was having on his data center operations. Although he’d started virtualization, there was a clear need to standardize, drive down costs, and fix platforms supporting apps on bare metal.
The solution: FlexPod based on Cisco UCS, Cisco Nexus and NetApp storage.
Bart introduced a great new term that I immediately decided to adopt: technology debt. Once Walz moved from the older, legacy server and storage technology that was failing to deliver to the current needs of his business he found that the benefits weren’t just incremental gains. Instead, the company achieved a complete paradigm shift with failures dropping from once every few months to 1x per year, and from an RTO of <12 hrs to <10 minutes for bare metal recoveries.
There are 7 key building blocks to achieving a real world cloud environment.
Continue reading "Real-World Clouds Built on Cisco and NetApp" »
Next week I’ll be supporting the NetApp team at Cisco Live. Worldwide conferences can be a somewhat of a challenge for me, as I’d like to share the buzz and news of the show in blog posts yet my schedule tends to be booked solid with customer and partners meetings. This type of scheduling makes it rather difficult to find time to author a post.
This situation may be leading some to ask, “Does that mean we’re not going to read about what’s going on at Cisco Live next week?”
That’s a fair question; to which I am excited to share that I think we have a come up with a creative way to address this challenge! Each day of next week we will share the thoughts and perspectives from some of the most brilliant minds at Cisco, VMware, and our partners via interviews that we will be conducting during the show!
We’re pretty excited about this format. We’re hoping it’ll prove to be a great way to share the excitement of the event, and with that said we’re going to kick-off our reporting in advance of the show…
Continue reading "Cisco Live chat with Andy Sholomon of Cisco" »
Joe Onisick at Define the Cloud posted a thought provoking article titled, “The Power of Innovative Datacenter Stacks” where he shares his views regarding the value and abilities delivered with 'single-vendor' and 'multi-vendor' integrated solution stacks such as FlexPod.
This post touches on a number of topics including the ability of a solution stack to deliver value, packaging best of breed technologies, and collaborative multi-vendor support models. As an architect for a leading systems integrator, Joe is as knowledgeable as one can be with leading data center technologies. You can be sure, Joe understands where 'the rubber meets the road' as he is responsible for delivering the capabilities available from today’s pre-packaged cloud architectures.
I’ve avoided mining Joe’s post for quotes. At just over 500 words, it’s straightforward and candid and I encourage you to read.
If you enjoy Joe's thoughts and would like to hear more, than I'd invite you to join Joe as he shares more of his thoughts and experiences live on the Innovative Versus Integration Cloud Infrastructure Stacks Webcast. This event is scheduled for May 26th and begins at 1:00 PM ET / 10:00 AM PT.
One of the key goals of the FlexPod architecture is accelerating the adoption of tier 1 applications. In delivering this goal Cisco & NetApp work with our infrastructure partners to producing and validating best in class architecture design guides that ensure solution design, supportability, availability and scalability. The use of these Cisco Validated Designs result in a reduction of resources required bringing a solution online.
We’ve released increase the FlexPod CVD library with the release of our SharePoint 2010 enterprise deployment design guide. This CDV details how to deploy Microsoft SharePoint 2010 for a real-world workload of 50,000 users. The design validation was completed using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate workloads and Visual Studio Load Test agents.
Continue reading "New FlexPod CVD Released – Microsoft SharePoint 2010" »
At VMware Partner Exchange, I was blown away with the number of success stories our partners shared around the impact FlexPod has made within their customer accounts. As I prepare for CiscoLive, the Empired Cloud Symposium, and a number of visits with partners in Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth I’d like to share with you some additional partner feedback.
In these clips Paul and Robert discuss how FlexPod for VMware is accelerating their customers’ needs to reduce the time required to bring solutions to market. With unmatched flexibility, efficiency, partner ecosystem for providing on-demand resources, and catalog of validated application design guides, FlexPod is clearly the most complete private cloud architecture available today.
Don’t Take My Word For It
Below Paul Sorgiovanni, Data Management Practice Manager at Empired LTD, shares his thoughts on how FlexPod has helped Empired evolve from a traditional systems integrator to as a trusted advisor while accelerating their customers adoption of a private cloud.
Continue reading "Partners Love FlexPod - Success Stories" »
Last week I presented our portfolio of desktop virtualization solutions to a group of Cisco engineers and account managers. These solutions are built on FlexPod and include desktop virtualization technologies from VMware and Citrix, include automated configuration instructions, and each is certified as a Cisco Validated Design (CVD). In short, we are working together to deliver integrated solutions intended to address the broadest set of IT and user requirements.
Today I want to share with you some of the data presented during this call that is truly amazing and clearly demonstrates why NetApp is the market leader in providing storage for virtual desktop solutions with Cisco, VMware, and Citrix.
Allow me to level set the discussion before going deeper
In terms of I/O load, desktop virtualization has two distinct operational modes that I’ll refer to as ‘Steady State’ and ‘I/O Storms’.
Continue reading "Virtual Storage Tiering and Desktop Virtualization" »
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. As a means to accelerate customers move toward a shard cloud platform Cisco, NetApp, and VMware released FlexPod™; a preconfigured and validated cloud architecture built on the Cisco® Unified Computing System™ (UCS), Cisco Nexus® data center switches, NetApp® FAS storage components, and a range of software partners.
Today Cisco & NetApp published our latest Cisco Validated Design (CVD) titled the FlexPod for VMware Deployment Model. This document describes the basic architecture of FlexPod for VMware as well as the general procedures for deploying a base FlexPod for VMware configuration. This document is intended for engineers who want to deploy a FlexPod for VMware architecture.
The CVD program consists of systems and solutions designed, tested, and documented to facilitate faster, more reliable, and more predictable customer deployments.
Continue reading "FlexPod for VMware Deployment Model CVD Now Available" »
I’ve caught a little break in my schedule here at VMware Partner Exchange, and thought I’d take a moment to share with you some of the 'keys to success' NetApp partners are having with FlexPod for VMware.
1. Flexibility of the Size of the Platform
The ability to be able to scale a solution, from diminutive to colossal, FlexPod provides a means to deliver custom-tailored solutions designed to fit a project’s requirements versus attempting to fit a project to a fixed architecture.
2. Enhanced Service Offerings
FlexPod allows partners to lead the delivery of the platform and it’s associated services. Customers win as they receive turnkey solutions with high-touch service from a trusted advisor. This delivery model allows partners to deepen their relationship with their customers.
Partners are providing a wide spectrum of services for FlexPod in areas such as:
3. Integration with Systems Management Platforms
The FlexPod architecture provides a set of open APIs that enable IT service management with third-party infrastructure and systems management solutions. This capability provides partners with an advantage when positioning FlexPod in their customer’s environments. The decision to offer FlexPod complete with systems management and orchestration capabilities can be determined on a customer-by-customer basis.
4. Density Wins Deals
It’s fairly well understood that the ability to increase the density of one’s infrastructure can provide a significant benefit in lowering operational expenses of a data center. FlexPod is unique as it is the only validated stack architecture which extends the increase in density provided by vSphere, UCS, and Nexus by providing unmatched storage efficiency via data deduplication for production applications.
What is interesting is partners are leveraging the costs savings provided by dedupe in a number of creative ways including:
Partners stated a number of examples ranging from an increase in UCS nodes to adding in business continuance components with VMware Site Recovery Manager.
I commend the ability of our partners to turn a technical capability of a NetApp array into a means where they demonstrate their expertise in designing cloud based architectures that increases their value in the eyes of the customer.
Wrapping Up
I feel very fortunate to work with such a great group of partners; you guys (and gals) truly rock! Thank you for being a partner and sharing your success stories with me. I need to run, but hope to find time to share more thoughts before Partner Exchange wraps up.
Today BMC Software and Cisco announced a strategic alliance to develop and market new solutions for large-scale multi-tenant cloud computing infrastructures. This is phenomenal news as last year NetApp and BMC formed our strategic alliance to provide joint customers with the solutions and infrastructure to accelerate the adoption of cloud infrastructures.
Today's announcement will result in end-to-end solutions with the ability to provision and manager servers, networking, storage arrays and virtual machines. The combination of these mutual alliances provide joint BMC, Cisco, and NetApp customers the benefit of a fully automated end-to-end cloud infrastructure beginning with the initial service request to “one click” provisioning, deployment, management and decommissioning, which extends to address the most complex & demanding deployments like our joint Secure Multi-Tenancy solution or FlexPOD architectures.
So What’s Available Today?
Today customers who deploy cloud services via BMC Business Service Management platform can have the NetApp storage catalog as an integrated component via BMC’s Atrium Orchestrator. This means a storage administrator can define the policies for NetApp efficiency, availability, provisioning and protection, and have storage provisioned automatically as part of an enterprise service catalog. This integration includes NetApp Provisioning Manager and the VSC 2.0 via the BMC Cloud Extension Pack for Cloud Lifecycle Management.
Continue reading "BMC is Leading Cloud Infrastructure Management" »
Last week NetApp rocked the industry with our most significant product launch ever. Cisco played a key role with the release of FlexPods, a validated, pre-designed, base configuration built on Cisco UCS and Nexus and NetApp FAS storage components designed to be elastic and to scale incrementally both up and out.
This week our positions are reversed.
Cisco today announced the Cisco Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI), a vision that includes a comprehensive desktop virtualization reference architecture and solution spanning collaboration, borderless networking and data center technologies. The VXI design incorporates Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View to offer solutions that have been built and validated through extensive three-way collaboration between Citrix-Cisco-NetApp and VMware-Cisco-NetApp.
On Thursday, November 11th Stephen Foskett and the folks at Gestalt IT will spend the morning at NetApp as a part of their visit to Silicon Valley for Gestalt IT Tech Field Day 4! Vendors and independent thought leaders meet to exchange information and views related to the technical advancements and the role of advanced storage capabilities in virtual and cloud infrastructures.
When: Thursday, November 11, 2010: 8 a.m. - 12 p.m. PT
Where: NetApp Founder’s Theater, 495 East Java Drive, Sunnyvale, CA, Building 1. The event will also be streamed online!
Event Schedule:
This event will allow you to learn more about a number of the technologies and solutions shared during our Future Ready event including FlexPod! The event will include live streaming video, blogging, and tweets, so you can interact with the delegates during the event.
Join us wont you? I promise you sharing our solutions and technologies with industry experts like the delegate from Gestalt IT is always a rewarding experience.
For more information go to: http://gestaltit.com/field-day/2010-san-jose/
Today we held our ‘Future Ready’ event, which was the largest product launch in the history of NetApp. This launch was so extensive it included updates to three quarters of our portfolio and introduced a slew of net new features, products, and solutions.
Am I excited? That’s an understatement!
Current global economic conditions are reshaping business and success is becoming increasingly dependent on the ability of IT to transition to a flexible and efficient shared IT infrastructure that enables IT and accelerate business. NetApp is innovating to meet these challenges and id like to highlight just a few of the key announcements included in today's launch!
There’s so much content to dig into and share that you should expect a significant number of posts from many at NetApp over the next few days. Per my norm, I will share with you details on a number of these technologies specifically as the pertain to virtual and cloud infrastructures starting with FlexPod.
Cisco and NetApp Announce FlexPod for VMware
As a part of Today’s Future Ready Launch we announced FlexPod for VMware, a infrastructure designed to enhance and accelerate the adoption of private and public cloud. FlexPod was developed in partnership with Cisco, NetApp and VMware and were modeled after the infrastructures delivering services for the world’s largest cloud service providers.
Continue reading "Announcing FlexPod for VMware from Cisco & NetApp" »
