In today's data centers, organizations want to further accelerate application deployment, resulting in even greater demands on the IT infrastructure. The need for speed and efficiency is paramount and keeping pace with dynamic priorities requires infrastructure flexibility, agility, and automation. Hence, leveraging an application-centric operational model is now essential.

FlexPod has become a leader in integrated infrastructure by combining Cisco UCS integrated infrastructure (Cisco UCS & Nexus) and NetApp storage systems into a single system, this integrated infrastructure approach provides the ability to dramatically improve the efficiency and agility of data center infrastructure, while reducing deployment risks.

FlexPod is the first integrated infrastructure to validate Cisco ACI. Cisco and NetApp have recently released FlexPod Datacenter with Cisco Application Centric (ACI) Infrastructure and Microsoft SharePoint 2013 with Cisco ACI design guides. Cisco ACI is a holistic architecture with centralized automation and policy-driven application profiles that delivers software flexibility with hardware performance. The Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) defines policy-based application network profiles and provides a single point of control for ACI fabric.

Typically, the configuration of infrastructure to support multi-tier applications is manual and time consuming with a risk for errors. The validation of FlexPod with Cisco ACI can enable IT teams to provision applications in hours instead of months and accelerate the deployment of application-ready infrastructure. With UCS Director, FlexPod with Cisco ACI will be able to leveraging the application network profiles from APIC, service profiles from Cisco UCS Manager, and integration with NetApp storage management to ensure that all infrastructure elements align with the application. This automation of integrated infrastructure (compute, network, and storage) in sync with the needs of the applications can enable IT to deliver unprecedented speed and efficiency.

To learn more about FlexPod with ACI please check out the solution brief and to see the latest on our FlexPod portfolio visit our web page.