Flexpod Recipes for Success

Imagine for a moment a world without recipes or food preparation as a service—a globe without restaurants, documented food preparation techniques, or quickly available food. It would be a difficult world indeed, if when you needed to prepare or purchase food, you would have no guidance or services. You couldn’t count on success without recipes that tell you what works.

Restaurants of almost every culture and nation depend on standardized processes. Even home-cooked meals often use recipes that guarantee the eating experience that the culture, family, or person loves. Recipes, restaurants, and how-to formulas are essential to our day-to-day lives. The current digitization of recipes, restaurant menus, and means of ordering food helps, too. We can order restaurant meals through online applications and have them delivered to us. Recipes and cookbooks are also available online.

Similarly, we can use IT recipes based on the FlexPod^® platform(Cisco Validated Designs, NetApp Validated Architectures, White Papers and Technical Reports), a joint solution from NetApp and Cisco. There’s the large and growing portfolio of FlexPod IT 195+ recipes for effective reference architectures. FlexPod is a scalable, reliable, cloud-connected platform with a proven track record of success. With the FlexPod platform, you get a wide diversity of IT recipes for hybrid cloud (backup, tiering, DR), databases, VMware, OpenStack, OpenShift, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), AI/ML, healthcare apps, and nearly instant public cloud connection. New recipes for imaging, electronic health record (EHR), PACS, and other healthcare functions are constantly being added. And recipes for applications like SQL Server, VMware, SAP HANA, SAP, and Oracle are continually refreshed for the latest software versions and the finest ingredients (such as the latest CPUs and GPUs). Recipes keep up with the latest technologies from NetApp and Cisco (such as data fabric that uses NetApp® solutions, Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), MDS switches, and Cisco Intersight operations platform, Cisco UCS X-Series Modular System ). In short, FlexPod combines all the finest ingredients in a growing family of recipes. These ingredients are the latest technologies, solutions, applications, software, and hardware from NetApp, Cisco, and the IT industry at large.

If you don’t have enough recipes or enough diversity of tested workloads available, you’re forced to create your IT solutions from scratch. Most other converged offerings don’t use the finest ingredients, FlexPod solutions do. FlexPod is the way to go: It has the most recipes and the best ingredients. Also, these ingredients are being constantly refreshed with technology, solutions and innovation updates from both Cisco and NetApp.

Over the last few months, new recipes have been added to the FlexPod cookbook:

• FlexPod for OpenShift that uses a container storage interface (CSI) with NetApp Astra™ Trident for Kubernetes Driver for NetApp storage systems. This solution gives you container orchestrators such as Kubernetes to manage the lifecycle of your persistent storage.
• FlexPod running VMware 7.0 lets you install a bullet-proof, on-premises VMware 7.0 environment with the option to move to a hybrid cloud environment with your data fabric powered by NetApp. It doesn’t matter whether your company is small or large. FlexPod running VMware 7.0 also uses Cisco Intersight to identify hardware in a growing family of FlexPod workflows to lower your operational costs.
• FlexPod MetroCluster IP with VXLAN Multi-Site Fabric for a low recovery point objective (RPO) and almost complete elimination of downtime.
• FlexPod for genomics (available in mid-November) bringing the scale and reliability of FlexPod to one of the most challenging new workloads in the health care industry.
• FIPS 140-2 Security-compliant FlexPod design across your healthcare IT landscape.
• FlexPod customers now have a FlexPod SQL Server 2019 running on VMware 7.0 solution that introduces standardization, connection to the cloud, helps customers mitigate the risk and uncertainty involved in planning, designing, and implementing a new SQL Server infrastructure.
• Oracle 19c on FlexPod with end-to-end NVMe to reliably speed up and scale your most challenging Oracle RAC workloads.
• A FlexPod for AI solution that delivers a simplified user experience for data scientists by abstracting the infrastructure layer and providing AI/ML specialists with a simplified usage model through automation and orchestration. FlexPod also helps support the AI lifecycle of training and inferencing across edge and core locations. And FlexPod integrates seamlessly with the public cloud through a data fabric powered by NetApp, enabling you to build your FlexPod AI data fabric. 

A relatively recent step for recipes and the restaurant industry was food as a service that uses multiple digital touchpoints to offer online food ordering and food delivery platforms.

Similarly, because FlexPod is such a strong platform with many digital recipes and fast public cloud connection, it has become a building block of many IT-as-a-service companies, including All for One Group and Outscale. In addition, Conscia is a wonderful example of a FlexPod recipe as a building block for an as-a-service business. Conscia is leveraging FlexPod recipes for hybrid cloud solutions for its customers.

If you are hungry for great food, consider using your favorite home recipe or going to a wonderful restaurant. If you need a scalable, reliable, available, and secure IT solution that has been tested in a huge variety of workloads, technologies, and innovations consider FlexPod.

If you are interested in learning more about FlexPod, check out what is on the FlexPod menu for the upcoming NetApp INSIGHT® sessions or visit us at www.flexpod.com , www.netapp.com/flexpod or www.cisco.com/go/flexpod:

View sessions
BRK-1374-1 Learn how FlexPod NG Expands Your datacenter to the Cloud
DEM-1376-1 Enable your Future Hybrid Cloud with FlexPod
BRK-1413-2 Transform your AI, Hybrid Cloud and Healthcare with FlexPod
BRK-1464-2 Modernize IT with Cisco Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure and Operations
DEM-1379-1 Protect, host and manage your cloud native apps with FlexPod

For additional information after the event visit:
www.flexpod.com
www.netapp.com/flexpod
www.cisco.com/go/flexpod

Blog posts:
blog.netapp.com/tag/flexpod
www.linkedin.com/showcase/flexpod-converged-infrastructure/
twitter.com/FlexPod

Or schedule a meeting with our FlexPod team: www.netapp.com/forms/vip-meetings/. We would love to talk with you. Also to sample other NetApp solutions outside of FlexPod, please sign-up for Insight at Insight.NetApp.com next week or over the next few month at your convenience.