Today’s dynamic market is driving vendors to create “better-together” offerings, providing customers complete solutions. In a recent briefing with ESG, NetApp and Cisco explained the value of the next generation of FlexPod and its increasing momentum.
The FlexPod franchise
The FlexPod platform provides an intelligent, cloud-like experience designed to power demanding applications, integrate advanced cloud services, and manage data more easily. In this briefing, the team shared how recent innovation across the FlexPod portfolio provides several ways to address customers’ biggest challenges.
First, the FlexPod platform provides innovation in the data center with new technologies. For example, we looked at use cases where FlexPod supports modern infrastructure, workload consolidation, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions in order to run large enterprise applications. The hybrid cloud is integrated to provide:
- Automation with HashiCorp Terraform.
- Disaster recovery (DR) with NetApp cloud volumes, Cisco IKS, and Red Hat OpenShift with NetApp Astra.
- Native integration across hyperscalers.
This solution is optimized for healthcare electronic health record systems and FIPS security-compliant offerings.
So, what’s new with FlexPod XCS? Leveraging Cisco Intersight, Cisco’s SaaS-based cloud operations platform, FlexPod provides the ability to easily manage compute and storage with automation for application and infrastructure deployment. It also offers hybrid cloud services to ensure business continuity and provides appdev and backup/recovery services.
In addition, Cisco and NetApp now offer FlexPod in a consumption model that aligns costs to usage, lowers the upfront costs, and provides operational and financial flexibility. NetApp’s Keystone and Cisco Plus consumption models are leveraged to enable the new FlexPod consumption model.
This effort by the two vendors is in alignment with our latest ESG research[1], which highlights the rise of consumption-based IT. While 45% of organizations still prefer the traditional model with upfront hardware purchase and an annual maintenance charge, more than half (51%) of organizations are in favor of a consumption-based model in which data center infrastructure is pay-per-use, a notable increase from 2019 (see figure below). (It is important to note that this question is presented as “assuming the net costs were the same.”)
But that’s not all, folks: NetApp acquires Fylamynt
In addition to the FlexPod briefing, there is more from NetApp, which recently acquired Fylamynt, a CloudOps automation technology that enables customers to build, run, manage, and analyze workflow security without code.
This is an interesting acquisition because it supports the messaging in this briefing. It shows that organizations running and operating in the cloud are looking for ways to securely change code and infrastructure but want to do it with fewer IT specialists. In fact, we have seen in ESG research[2] that 67% of organizations are looking to hire IT generalists over the next 12 months.
What does the Fylamynt acquisition do for organizations with IT skill shortages? By instituting a no-code cloud automation technology, organizations provide DevOps and site reliability engineers (SREs) the ability to scale, optimize, and maintain clouds at a reduced cost but also without having to assign a specialist to deploy these tasks.
Paul’s POV
The ever-changing technology market introduces friction and challenges to organizations looking to innovate and grow. Vendors that deliver unified and seamless solutions, without the need for IT specialists, provide organizations a faster time to delivery and deployment. Vendors working together for win-win scenarios provide ways to overcome the growing IT skill-gap challenges for customers, and NetApp is definitely working towards this with its portfolio.
Let’s talk about this topic in detail.
[1] Source: Research Report: Data Infrastructure Trends, November 2021
[2] Source: Research Report: Data Infrastructure Trends, November 2021
