Posted by Wen Yu, Alliances
Staff Systems Engineer
Looking for a low risk, agile and efficient architecture for your small cloud infrastructure deployment? Look no further because the VMware, NetApp and Cisco Entry Level FlexPod will be your answered. Entry Level FlexPod provides the value of FlexPod sized right for smaller workloads. Suitable for uses that include midsize enterprise workloads and remote or branch offices, FlexPod ES brings large-enterprise-class IT infrastructure to smaller deployments at a price that fits limited IT budgets. Let’s take technical dive into the architecture, and the built-in joint integrations that make life simple for IT architects and administrators.
Unified Highly Available, Scalable Architecture
Compute: Cisco UCS C200 rack mountable server connects directly to the Nexus 2000 fabric extender
Network: Cisco Nexus 2000 series Fabric Extender provides scalable unified server access across 1Gb to 10Gb Ethernet, and also serves as the extension to the access layer Nexus 5000 switch. All C200 servers connected to the fabric extender become a single unified highly available management domain
Storage: NetApp FAS2240 storage, with built-in 10Gb support, and also capable of running Data ONTAP Cluster mode
Cloud Infrastructure
The above hardware architecture serves as the solid foundation for VMware Cloud Infrastructure, which consists of vSphere, vCenter and Site Recovery Manager, to provide end customers with a highly available, scalable solution with built-in automation, hardware acceleration, management and business continuity capabilities.
Built-in Integration At a Glance
In addition to the built-in integrations above, the following VMware Cloud Infrastructure features help providing additional benefits for IT Architect and Admin, please refer to NetApp and VMware joint best practices paper TR3749 for further details.
Key Takeaway
Want to be part of the cloud journey? The first step is to lay the right foundation. VMware Cloud Infrastructure, together with Entry Level FlexPOD, provides customers with simple, low risk, highly available, highly efficient and highly scalable architecture – we can take you there!