It has been out for a while, but I have just come across the term Cisco Flexpod. So the big question is, What is Cisco Flexpod?
The official statement from Cisco is:
FlexPod is a Cisco and NetApp validated data center platform for hosting business applications on virtualized or bare-metal servers
So what does that mean? Well if you are looking to deloy a new data center design, instead of doing the research yourself or with a third party Cisco already have some validated designs that work. No more worrying about if the HP Virtual connect card will run FCOE to the Nexus and will this Netapp talk 10Gig to my Nexus. Cisco have done the hard work so you don’t have to.
The flexpod concept is between Nexus and Netapp as a base to build on and then using the Cisco UCS Blade servers adding functionality on top. The first validated design was for VMware, there are now many others all tested to work on this platform.
Having just come through a big data center build trying to get Netapp, Nexus and HP C7000 blades and the associated Virtual connect cards to all work together happily, I am really looking forward to learning more about the Cisco Flexpod concept and design.
This is a typical Cisco Validated Design for Vmware using the Cisco Flexpod
For more info go to www.cisco.com/go/flexpod
There are sure to be more posts on this subject as I am hoping to get a lot closer to this technology in the coming months.
