Hopefully to some readers the Walz Group may ring a bell. In July of 2011 I attended Cisco Live where I had the privilege to spend time with Bart Falzarano, the Chief Information Security Officer at the Walz Group. Bart allowed me to share his perspective in a blog post where he discussed the requirements of a modern datacenter and the role the datacenter plays in addressing business challenges.
Bart wan’t speaking from a theoretical perspective. The Walz Group; a leader in providing communications and compliance solutions for large financial institutions, government agencies, law firms, healthcare providers, insurance firms in the United States, had been facing massive growth in their customer base and an ever increasing set of government regulations. They were challenged as how to best address the current needs of their datacenter while ensuring the ability to support the unforeseen challenges of tomorrow.
After a significant amount of research the Walz Group deployed a FlexPod from Cisco & NetApp to meet the needs of the VMware infrastructure and bare-metal servers. The FlexPod platform provided a number of benefits including…
- The new shared infrastructure was deployed in 4 days
- Rapidly deploy applications
- Provision servers and storage 94% faster
- Seamlessly scale up, out, or back
- Achieve 99.998% up time
- Cut rack requirements 50%
Today I learned the Walz Group FlexPod case study and video have been published and are available to the public. if you are considering a unified datacenter platform, you may find the information contained within each rather compelling. There’s additional information available to Cisco & NetApp employees at CiscoNetApp.com, which includes additional reference materials and Bart’s presentation from Cisco Live 2011.
“With Cisco, NetApp, and VMware, we’ve made our applications survivable, and untied them from a particular server. We can turn on additional compute and storage whenever we need it, increasing utilization and supporting continued business growth.”
— Bart Falzarano, Chief Information Security Officer, Walz Group
Does the flexpod solution support ontap 8.0.2 and/or greater? Also how about ucs 2.0. I’ve scoured the net including netapp support site along with Cisco but haven’t seen any CVD or anything else.
Daniel,
Data ONTAP 8.0.2 is currently supported with FlexPod. You should expect an official CVD to be published in mid-February that references 8.0.2. To verify what is supported with FlexPod prior to CVD updates one can refer to the NetApp Interoperability Matrix Tool (or IMT) https://now.netapp.com/matrix.
Here’s a complimentary blog that discusses the 6 Benefits of VMware vSphere Built on NetApps FlexPod Infrastructure Solution. FlexPod is making some great inroads in helping data centers take advantage of the cloud. Good stuff!
Hi Vaughn,
Just want to give you a heads up that you post was featured on the VMware Global Alliances Blog weekly news round up post: http://bit.ly/A7wBAE