IT organization of enterprise or commercial customers alike, always grapple with timely delivery of business application environments that combines best-in-class servers, networking, storage, and data management solution in a single optimized centrally managed computing system. They always looking to simplify operations, reduce cost, increase performance, and optimize physical capacity requirements. In response, Cisco and NetApp joined together more than a decade ago to integrate their best technologies to produce FlexPod, a converged infrastructure solution that fuels IT innovation and while driving application and business performance.

In March this year, we jointly progressed to next level by announcing FlexPod XCS aimed at simplifying and accelerating our customers' hybrid cloud journeys.  The FlexPod XCS is the first and only converged infrastructure natively integrated into Cisco Intersight presented as Integrated Systems, to harness the power of cloud-based management for operating, monitoring, and managing your on-prem FlexPod infrastructure deployed anywhere in the globe.

What's New?

One of the core capabilities of FlexPod XCS is to provide full stack visibility across its computing, networking, storage, hypervisor/container environment from a single control plane. FlexPod XCS takes visibility to next levels beyond merely delivering standard consumption data through matrix and dashboards. It helps customers answer important questions such as how to gain more insights of your FlexPod installations or whether FlexPod components are compliant for interoperability. The FlexPod XCS answers these important questions with the new interoperability compliance check feature.

This feature significantly improves on the traditional method of relying on Cisco's HCL and NetApp's Interoperability Matrix Tool manually and in order to confirm compliance for interoperability of FlexPod components. The feature consolidates separate web-based tools which were allowing customers to select hardware and software components from the drop-down menu items, comparing results, and then conclude if their environment is compliant or not. A manual process prone to human errors and wrong interpretations. With the FlexPod XCS interoperability compliance check feature, these pain points are eliminated with a click of a button!

How it works

FlexPod XCS interoperability feature leverages Cisco Intersight Cloud Orchestrator (ICO) work-flow engine to do the magic here. It collects FlexPod component inventory as discovered by the system, getting compliance data from Cisco HCL and NetApp IMT under the hood, to generating interoperability report for you to consume. You now  have a choice to run the check as many times and whenever you want. It provides you with an option to remediate hardware and software versions and then run the check again to become compliant.

More details

Few sample interoperability compliance check feature summary reports.

Top level summary:

Server compliance summary:

What's next?

We understand making infrastructure management easier, is paramount to meeting your everchanging business needs. Stay tuned over the next couple of months as we plan to release additional key feature sets to compliment our FlexPod XCS visibility stack and overall FlexPod feature roadmap.

To learn more and further information, please consultthe information located in the links below in our Resources section.

Resources

Flexpod.com

Cisco Intersight Integrated Systems