October 26, 2020 By BlueAlly
Cisco and NetApp have been innovating together around the FlexPod platform for more than 10 years, with an eye to continuously integrating the best technologies of these industry-leading companies. To date we have delivered 170+ Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs) for FlexPod.
It is truly remarkable how the singular FlexPod platform architecture continues to deliver value for the many use cases that customers care about, including databases; server or desktop virtualization; hybrid cloud; secure multitenancy, and business continuity.
In the past, many looked at FlexPod as an on-premises-only platform, with compute and networking managed by Cisco UCS Manager and storage arrays managed by ONTAP; but today customers want even more. Inspired by the cloud-world we all live in, FlexPod customers also want simplified provisioning and operation of their hybrid IT environments.
In response, Cisco and NetApp are tightly integrating ONTAP, NetApp’s storage operating system, with Intersight, Cisco’s SaaS systems management platform, so that customers can manage FlexPod deployments through the Cisco Intersight cloud management platform. Cisco and NetApp are jointly working toward a release of the integration in the next few months.
The result is that through the Intersight cloud-platform, customers and partners will be able to simplify the management of day-to-day storage operations for both their bare-metal and their virtualized FlexPod environments. This integration effectively allows users to provision, monitor, and seamlessly gain deeper insights into system-level information that were not previously available through a single application.
Customers and partners will be able to utilize Intersight to handle common ONTAP tasks such as creation and deletion of FC and IP interfaces, SAN/NFS Volumes, and LUNs, as well as definition of storage policies. Either custom or pre-defined workflows built using the integrated ONTAP tasks could be utilized in Intersight to execute NFS and SAN datastore operations for virtual machines.
The NetApp ONTAP integration with Cisco Intersight is an important building block in managing the entire stack. In fact, the range of future innovations that can be built on the Cisco- and NetApp- developed FlexPod platform is absolutely limitless. Stay tuned for even more capabilities from the Cisco and NetApp strategic partnership, as we navigate the next 10 years of joint innovation.
