The next two blogs of this series discuss Cisco UCS X-Series in Converged Infrastructure solutions with 100G Unified Fabric. First up FlexPod XCS.

What is a FlexPod XCS?

Earlier this year Cisco and NetApp introduced FlexPod XCS bringing visibility, automation, flexible consumption, and hybrid cloud operations to FlexPod. In a nutshell, FlexPod XCS is a suite of capabilities designed to simplify operations and accelerate the delivery of modern apps. FlexPod XCS is fully managed by Cisco Intersight and provides five key capabilities:

• Enhanced visibility of storage, servers, networking, and the virtual environment through the Cisco Intersight platform that provides a single, detailed view of all components, enabling more intelligent resource decisions.
• Automation to speed deployment of hardware and VMs with Cisco Intersight Cloud Orchestrator for faster time to value
• Hybrid cloud operations with Cisco Intersight and NetApp ONTAP storage data services for AWS, Azure, and GCP
• Enables a consumption model for more financial flexibility with FlexPod as a Service
• Interoperability compliance check covering both the Cisco HCL and NetApp IMT for underlaying hardware and software components at one place

In the video, Technical Marketing Engineer John George walks you through the components of a FlexPod XCS solution in Intersight. One key thing to note is how both UCS X-Series servers and C-Series servers can be used in the same solution allowing you to choose the best server for your application. FlexPod XCS also supports UCS B-Series servers.

Why FlexPod?

Why has FlexPod remained so popular? It's all about integration and validation. FlexPod combines Cisco compute and networking with NetApp storage into a single solution so customers can quickly deploy infrastructure workloads with less risk and overhead. FlexPod helps minimize costly and time-consuming hardware integrations and we have a long history of validated designs with FlexPod.  The most recent of our more than 200 references architectures is X-Series, 100G end-to-end networking, and Cisco Intersight. The customer gains lower risk, higher ROI, increased productivity, and backward compatibility without rip and replace.

Additionally, FlexPod as-a-service (FPaaS) offers a flexible consumption model for all FlexPod solutions that is provisioned for today, and flexible for the future. FPaaS accelerates the transformation of infrastructure into a virtualized, shared environment with standardized and scalable building blocks-enabling IT teams to create a seamless hybrid cloud environment. The FPaaS is designed to provide you with the scalability, agility and performance to meet your business requirements, when you need it. The end customer gets a cloud consumption model with their FlexPod, resulting in limited up-front expense, payment consistency, and the ability to grow.

What's next?

Come back next week to read about UCS X-Series based FlashStack solutions.

Resources 

• FlexPod XCS Solution Brief
• FlexPod XCS Infographic
• FlexPod XCS -The First Cisco Intersight Integrated Systems White Paper
• FlexPod Datacenter with Citrix VDI and VMware vSphere 7 for up to 2500 Seats CVD
• FlexPod Datacenter with Cisco UCS X-Series, VMware 7.0 U2, and NetApp ONTAP 9.9 Design Guide CVD
• FlexPod Datacenter with End-to-End 100G, Cisco Intersight Managed Mode, VMware 7U3, and NetApp ONTAP 9.11 Design Guide
• FlexPod Datacenter with Cisco UCS X-Series White Paper
• FlexPod Datacenter Improves Your IT Operations for Oracle Database
• More FlexPod blogs
  • FlexPod XCS blog#1 -FlexPod XCS Interoperability Compliance -Unique Compliance Check with Cisco HCL & NetApp IMT together
• FlexPod website
• More FlexPod videos
  • FlexPod XCS: Accelerating your hybrid cloud journey
  • Modernize IT with FlexPod, UCS X-Series and Cisco Intersight
• All Cisco UCS X-Series resources
• Cisco Intersight
• Request a 1:1 Cisco Intersight demo
• All X-Series blogs
  • X-Series video blog#1 -Server deployment done right -Cisco UCS X-Series with Intersight
  • X-Series video blog#2 -VDI to GPU Accelerated VDI -Cisco UCS X-Series with X-Fabric Technology
  • X-Series video blog#3 -Automation with UCS X-Series leveraging Cisco Intersight and Ansible
  • X-Series video blog#4 -Easily deploy your hybrid cloud apps with UCS X-Series and deploying Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform
  • X-Series video blog#5 -Maximize your Oracle database performance with Cisco UCS X-Series
  • X-Series video blog#6 -Performance made simple with Cisco UCS X-Series powered by Intersight
  • X-Series video blog#7 -Cisco UCS X-Series -100G end-to-end networking
  • X-Series video blog#8 -Cisco UCS X-Series -100G Unified Fabric for storage