Ip Scheme

Overview

Industry trends indicate a vast data center transformation toward shared infrastructures. By using virtualization, enterprise customers have embarked on the journey to the cloud by moving away from application silos and toward shared infrastructure, thereby increasing agility and reducing costs. Cisco and NetApp have partnered to deliver FlexPod, which serves as the foundation for a variety of workloads and enables efficient architectural designs that are based on customer requirements.

Audience

This document describes the architecture and deployment procedures of an infrastructure composed of Cisco®, NetApp®, and VMware® virtualization that uses FCoE-based storage serving NAS and SAN protocols. The intended audience for this document includes, but is not limited to, sales engineers, field consultants, professional services, IT managers, partner engineering, and customers who want to deploy the core FlexPod architecture with NetApp clustered Data ONTAP®.

Architecture

The FlexPod architecture is highly modular or "podlike." Although each customer's FlexPod unit varies in its exact configuration, after a FlexPod unit is built, it can easily be scaled as requirements and demand change. The unit can be scaled both up (adding resources to a FlexPod unit) and out (adding more FlexPod units).

Specifically, FlexPod is a defined set of hardware and software that serves as an integrated foundation for both virtualized and nonvirtualized solutions. VMware vSphere® built on FlexPod includes NetApp storage, NetApp Data ONTAP, Cisco networking, the Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS®), and VMware vSphere software in a single package. The design is flexible enough that the networking, computing, and storage can fit in one data center rack or be deployed according to a customer's data center design. Port density enables the networking components to accommodate multiple configurations of this kind.

One benefit of the FlexPod architecture is the ability to...