According to industry analysts, transitioning to the Cloud is now a top priority for CIOs seeking to accelerate application delivery and IT’s responsiveness to the business. IT leaders across North America are actively engaged in Cloud-related planning. Some are building a business case to justify the move. Others are mapping out a Cloud strategy, and many are now actively in pilot or prototype phase.
But at very phase of planning and implementation, the transition to the Cloud is not without its challenges. IT continues to be asked by the business to do more with less, and many organizations have not fully recovered from the budget cuts and headcount reductions incurred during the economic downturn. And when much of the IT budget is devoted to simply keeping today’s infrastructure running, CIOs are looking for new efficiencies and smart measures that allow them embrace the Cloud — and achieve desired levels of flexibility and responsiveness within the Data Center– without breaking the bank.
To solve this business challenge, enterprise software vendors NetApp, VMware, and Cisco have teamed together to deliver FlexPod® Data Centre Platform. FlexPod® is a prevalidated platform integrating the key components required for Cloud transition into a single flexible architecture. FlexPod® brings together NetApp® unified storage systems and Cisco® Unified Computing System™ servers and Cisco Nexus® switches. This technology is then paired with software solutions from Microsoft, SAP and VMware to deliver near-immediate value to the enterprise.
Storage from NetApp is a key component of the FlexPod® platform. With data volumes literally exploding in the enterprise, CIOs and IT Directors are aggressively seeking out storage solutions that offer maximum flexibility and efficiency.
Neil Daniel, System Engineering Manager for Central and Eastern Canada expands on IT’s storage requirements: “We read in the media about the challenge of managing Big Data, but the problem for CIOs is very real. Today, the biggest single line item in today’s IT budget is devoted to storage. CIOs need flexibility in their storage methods – they can’t be tied into a single, restrictive architecture. They need scalability, so they can expand capacity easily as storage requirements change and volumes grow. And they need performance. They need a solution that promises no outages, no disruptions. Successful shifts to a dynamic data center with shared infrastructure depend upon a shared, secure, networked storage infrastructure capable of eliminating the “silos” of storage associated with various application tiers. The inherent efficiency of unified storage architectures, like those provided by NetApp, magnifies the data center’s savings in power, cooling, and space utilization.”
Key FlexPod® Benefits
- Increased flexibility
- Enhanced efficiency
- Reduced risk
Neil Daniel’s Advice for CIOs and IT Directors Considering a Converged Architecture for the Data Center
- Ensure your solution is application aware – take a holistic architectural view when making infrastructure decisions, and consider the applications to be supported. FlexPod® offers a variety of validated designs, and step by step best practices to ensure the chosen solution fits the requirements of specific application environments.
- Go for maximum efficiency – make infrastructure decisions that offer maximum leverage, and actively seek out a shared infrastructure that can support multiple applications.
- Stay flexible – to ensure your infrastructure investment works for you today and for tomorrow, seek out options that offer the ultimate flexibility. Avoid solutions that are too rigid and that are unable to scale to support future needs.
Are you making the move to the Cloud and considering a move to a converged architecture for the data center in the near future? Let’s talk about your needs. Contact FoxNet at info@206.198.185.142
Foxnet FlexPod® Partners
