Cisco and NetApp Celebrate Five Years of FlexPod Customer Success

SAN JOSE, CA and SUNNYVALE, CA--(Marketwired - Oct 13, 2015) - Cisco and NetApp, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTAP) today marked five years of delivering unprecedented value to customers with FlexPod integrated infrastructure solutions.

The NetApp and Cisco FlexPod collaboration has helped simplify and modernize enterprise IT so that organizations can achieve better business outcomes. FlexPod customers benefit from proven technology, a strong partner ecosystem and the ability to rapidly integrate new innovations. Customers and partners can choose from more than 100 validated application and infrastructure designs that increase productivity, speed decision making and produce stronger business results.

In its first five years, FlexPod has experienced incredible growth, generating shared revenues of $5.6 billion. Today, more than 6,300 customer organizations and 1,100 partners worldwide have experienced how FlexPod lets them reimagine what technology can do.

"Competition for customers is fierce. Requirements for responsiveness, availability and speed have never been higher. In FlexPod, Cisco and NetApp have created the ideal solution to meet these evolving business demands," said George Kurian, CEO of NetApp. "The capabilities of Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite and NetApp Data Fabric enable customers to seamlessly extend their IT systems from the private cloud to the public cloud, on their terms. Customers can be confident that their investments in FlexPod today will enable their businesses to succeed and evolve with the changing business and IT landscape."

"Cisco and NetApp share the same vision to empower every country, city and company to become digital. To do this, IT organizations need a simpler approach to deploy and manage infrastructure. Together, FlexPod and Cisco's partner network improve deployment time and prepare customers for the next wave of data center transformation," said Chuck Robbins, CEO of Cisco.

Partners and Customers Share their FlexPod Experience

"As NetApp's #1 FlexPod Partner for three years, ePlus has proven our success and expertise in designing, implementing and managing hundreds of FlexPods for our customers around the United States. Every day we hand-craft agile data centers and cloud solutions that deliver more to our customers. With FlexPod's amazing flexibility and the breadth of different workloads it already supports today, we're excited about the next five years," said Mark Melvin, chief technology officer of ePlus.

Patrick Goemaere, CTO of Virdata, a Technicolor Company, commented, "Our solution uses a FlexPod private cloud infrastructure for easy, modular scalability for both hybrid and on premise solutions. Running the NetApp Data ONTAP operating system, FlexPod gives Virdata a world-leading capability that eases capacity planning and that provides a validated reference platform. Virdata's IoT and Spark-enabled big data analytics services can now also operate within a secure, multi-tenant environment that spans the entire hardware, network and storage domains."

"Mercy built a state-of-the-art data center and implemented a flexible cloud infrastructure to effectively deploy and support an electronic health record for storing and protecting patient information, and now for extending to smaller clinics and healthcare systems," said Scott Richert, vice president of enterprise services at Mercy. With the help of the NetApp FlexPod architecture, we have saved over 40 percent of storage space, reduced power consumption by 50 percent, and now provide rapid access to and data protection for millions of patients."

"Specifically for the racetrack, we needed a small and lightweight system that can be easily flown from one place to the next. It had to be extremely reliable and deliver the performance required for demanding graphics applications. With our mobile FlexPod data center, we can implement this highly efficiently," said a representative of Sauber Motorsport AG. "Without FlexPod, and with only conventional technology, a data center of this type would be extremely difficult to realize, and the cost of resources would certainly be higher."

Expanding FlexPod Capabilities
Backed by one of the most successful alliances in the industry, FlexPod has quickly become the integrated infrastructure of choice for many of the largest enterprises around the globe. NetApp and Cisco, with their partners, continue to expand FlexPod capabilities to address new business requirements.

FlexPod validated designs for Application Performance, Cloud, and Automation:

• FlexPod with NetApp All Flash FAS and Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) delivers increased application performance without downtime, driving higher productivity, operational efficiency, and smart decision making.
  This design supports the entire software development lifecycle with easy, low-friction switching across flash, disk and cloud resources for infrastructure using Cisco ACI profiles and policies.
• FlexPod with Cisco ACI for Microsoft (Exchange and SharePoint) offers a simple, policy-based approach to application deployment. By automating layers of configuration that IT staff typically performs manually today, IT can deliver the resources that key business applications need in less time and with end-to-end enterprise-class security.
• FlexPod for SAP Applications enables organizations to run multiple SAP HANA production systems in one FlexPod solution with less risk and greater flexibility. It also delivers the needed performance to run SAP applications servers and an SAP HANA database on the same FlexPod infrastructure.
• FlexPod for SAP Applications with Cisco ACI enables organizations to rapidly deploy SAP HANA based applications while also meeting the critical performance requirements. Cisco ACI's policy based approach delivers the required security and governance required by enterprises who are moving their enterprise applications to SAP HANA.
• FlexPod for SAP Applications with Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure Using Policy-Based Automation and Vnomic dramatically accelerates and simplifies the deployment and operation of large-scale SAP applications and SAP HANA database, helping to eliminate error-prone process, and aligning network behavior with application requirements.
• FlexPod with Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) Director and Cisco ACI automates workflows for rapid, no-touch, policy-based provisioning of application infrastructure. Cisco UCS Director coordinates the provisioning of both physical and virtual computing, networking, and storage components, reducing deployment time and helping to increase the pace of infrastructure delivery.
• FlexPod with OpenStack offers customers that are interested in tapping into the benefits of open source cloud economics, a simple way to quickly and reliably deploy OpenStack Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform (RHEL-OSP) cloud solutions. It is based on a proven and validated integrated infrastructure while offering the FlexPod Cooperative Support Model that provides both OpenStack and FlexPod support.

Making FlexPod Easier to buy, deploy, and own for Partners and Customers:

• FlexPod Services by Avnet One Frameworks is a new set of pre-configured and packaged converged infrastructure racks that combine products and services from Cisco, NetApp, and Avnet based on popular customer configurations. These four new offerings provide reseller partners with a high-velocity sales motion for quoting and shipping pre-validated, pre-integrated FlexPod configurations.
• FlexPod Post Implementation Validation Tools provide partners and customer with steps to help confirm that their FlexPod solution is aligned with the Cisco Validated Design guidelines. Gaps are determined and recommendations are made for application firmware and configuration that ensure customer deployments are properly supportable.
• FlexPod Lifecycle Management provides the tooling, documented step-by-step upgrade procedure, and ongoing FlexPod software stack validations necessary to minimize business disruption and preserve the asset value of a FlexPod Datacenter investment.

Additional Resources

• Learn more about FlexPod from Cisco and NetApp
• Find the FlexPod Five Year Anniversary Infographic here
• Follow NetApp on Twitter
• Follow Cisco on Twitter

About FlexPod
FlexPod is a portfolio of pre-validated, integrated infrastructure solutions that combine the Cisco Unified Computing System™ integrated infrastructure and NetApp storage components, FlexPod simplifies and modernizes IT with continuous innovation, delivering unmatched application performance, broad support for any cloud strategy, and improved operational efficiency to accelerate data center transformation and business evolution.

The FlexPod portfolio includes FlexPod Datacenter for core enterprise data centers and service providers, FlexPod Express for medium-sized businesses and branch offices, and FlexPod Select for data-intensive workloads. The portfolio is validated with leading hypervisors, operating systems, systems management tools, and cloud management platforms. All FlexPod components are orderable from their respective manufacturers' distribution or resale channel.

About Cisco
Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide leader in IT that helps companies seize the opportunities of tomorrow by proving that amazing things can happen when you connect the previously unconnected. For ongoing news, please go to thenetwork.cisco.com.

About NetApp 
Leading organizations worldwide count on NetApp for software, systems and services to manage and store their data. Customers value our teamwork, expertise and passion for helping them succeed now and into the future. To learn more visit www.netapp.com.

NetApp, the NetApp logo, Data ONTAP, FlexPod, and OnCommand are trademarks or registered trademarks of NetApp, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such. A current list of NetApp trademarks is available on the web at http://www.netapp.com/us/legal/netapptmlist.aspx.

Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. A listing of Cisco's trademarks can be found at www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company.

Forward Looking Statements:
NetApp: This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding the collaboration between NetApp, Cisco and other companies, NetApp remaining strongly committed to the FlexPod portfolio and expanding FlexPod capabilities, and NetApp and Cisco bringing significant value to mutual customers. All of these forward-looking statements involve risk and uncertainty. Actual results may differ materially from these statements for a variety of reasons, including, without limitation, the ability of the companies to partner successfully, the ability to achieve the expected benefits of FlexPod, economic and market conditions, and matters specific to our business, such as changes in storage consumption models and customer demand for and acceptance of our products and services. These and other equally important factors are described in reports and documents we file from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the factors described under the section titled "Risk Factors" in our most recently submitted Annual and Quarterly Reports on Forms 10-K and 10-Q, respectively. We disclaim any obligation to update information contained in this press release whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise.

Cisco: This release may be deemed to contain forward-looking statements, which are subject to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements include, among others, statements regarding the collaboration between Cisco, NetApp and other companies, Cisco remaining strongly committed to the FlexPod portfolio, Cisco continuing to lead the industry in data center, and Cisco and NetApp bringing significant value to mutual customers. Readers are cautioned that these forward-looking statements are only predictions and may differ materially from actual future events or results due to a variety of factors, including, the ability of the companies to partner successfully, the ability to achieve expected benefits of FlexPod, business and economic conditions and growth trends in the networking industry, customer markets and various geographic regions, global economic conditions and uncertainties in the geopolitical environment and other risk factors set forth in Cisco's most recent reports on Form 10-K and 10-Q. Any forward-looking statements in this release are based on limited information currently available to Cisco, which is subject to change, and Cisco will not necessarily update the information.