NFLEX: Fulfilling the Promise of Converged Infrastructure

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1 NFLEX: Fulfilling the Promise of Converged Infrastructure EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Converged Infrastructure (CI) was full of promises. Some kept, and some never fully realized. Today, CI continues to provide the backbone to many data centers and provide a natural pathway to future hybrid cloud infrastructures. Data center administrators have been successful with the complete flexibility of today s CI solutions, but they are enamored with the promise of HCI simplicity. NFLEX fills the gap with a Converged Infrastructure solution designed to increase simplicity within a framework of flexibility, with the confidence of factory integration. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction...1 Background...2 Solution Industry Perspective...6 Conclusion...7 Additional Resources...7 Fujitsu and NetApp are working together to deliver premier Converged Infrastructure based on industry standard technology leadership and unparalleled innovation, taking advantage of over twenty years of successful co-innovation. NFLEX is built on a core of technologies with industry-leading benchmarks in server and flash performance. Converged Infrastructure continues to grow and now maintains a large share of Tier 1 application deployments in the marketplace. INTRODUCTION NFLEX leverages the value of today s Converged Infrastructure with the added promise of simplicity. Converged Infrastructure was designed with efficiency in mind, both from a technical standpoint as users looked to automate their IT processes across components. And, from a business standpoint, CI can deliver cost and manageability efficiency by driving expenses down thanks to greater utilization and decreased physical hardware needs. In addition, the evolution of virtualized environments controlled via a single console was intended to help drive management efficiency for CI. The question IT administrators are asking themselves after years of deploying Converged Infrastructure is about the original promise of Converged Infrastructure. Are things simpler, more efficient and productive, with fewer headaches and greater utilization of resources? Is a new CI solution capable of delivering the promise of a truly simplified experience from end-to-end what they ve been waiting for? 1

2 BACKGROUND Technology is changing our everyday lives Digital transformation tops the strategic agenda in most organizations. To successfully transform, data is becoming the lifeblood of an organization, seamlessly flowing through it in order to enable new customer touchpoints through technology, create innovative business opportunities and optimize operations. IT leaders are under tremendous pressure to harness today s wealth of data and apply it to create new value across the entire organization all with limited time, skills, and budget. Avoiding complexity is key to delivering value Businesses are looking for agility, efficiency and quality without the headache. Too often the interaction between customer and vendor is slow, tangled and unclear. Couple this with legacy infrastructures and you have a cumbersome experience that hurts everyone, IT and the business. The administration across multiple management software and legacy hardware configurations is fraught with risk and cost. This makes being able to quickly deploy and provision new services to meet the demands of the organization a difficult task. Converged Infrastructure (CI) is evolving to support new application requirements CI is shifting from being largely hardware-defined to being largely software-defined. To enable greater alignment between infrastructure and workload, the common components such as server, compute, network and storage, are becoming less static and more dynamic. Customers expect this move to software-defined CI to result in intelligent control, allowing for automatic allocation and alignment of resources to workloads, and ultimately, a more autonomous data center. Now, more than ever, trusted advisors are needed Vendor choice has never been so important when choosing a CI solution. New solutions and technology often promise the world but are often forgotten or unsupported within a few years. To protect their investment and minimize the risk to the business when modernizing their infrastructure, companies depend on vendors with a history of innovation and leadership in the marketplace. NFLEX from Fujitsu and NetApp is the converged infrastructure that helps you deliver on the promise of modernized IT. 2

3 SOLUTION Enter NFLEX. Fulfilling the promise of Converged Infrastructure in a modernized IT environment. NFLEX is the brainchild of Fujitsu and NetApp. Two companies with a long history of partnership and innovative technology leadership. Having successfully developed and marketed a previous generation of CI together, PRIMEFLEX vshape, they worked to develop NFLEX to address the enemy of IT efficiencies and responsiveness: Complexity. NFLEX is built on three foundational pillars designed to alleviate the challenges and headaches IT administrators have been experiencing for years with traditional CI solutions. Simplify the Experience Making it easy to purchase, deploy, run and support your CI solution. NFLEX is specifically designed to make it easier to implement a Converged Infrastructure solution from the very start. Making deployment of a Converged Infrastructure solution simple means saving time and cost by purchasing via a single SKU, price and contract. With a fully pre-configured, tested and validated solution and one that is factory-integrated, pre-installed, and ready-to-run from the start, you ll see faster time-to-value with a solution that works on day 1 following installation and integration into a customer environment. Unified administration of hardware and software functions helps automate routine tasks and simplify overall management. Increase uptime and productivity with a single point of contact for support. Fujitsu and NetApp stand strongly behind NFLEX with an industry-leading support organization. NFLEX Design Principles NFLEX: The Highlights Basic configurations provide choice in terms of server nodes, main memory capacity and storage (hybrid or all-flash) capacity Expansion packs for Storage and Compute simplify scaling in any dimension. FUJITSU Software ServerView Infrastructure Manager (ISM) for converged infrastructure lifecycle management NetApp data provisioning, workload balancing, and capacity management One-stop support provided by either Fujitsu or NetApp Enhanced service available through Fujitsu global on-site support Simplicity Performance Confidence 3

4 Exceptional Capabilities Drive data center efficiencies to deliver higher value IT services. NFLEX, the Converged Infrastructure solution specifically designed to provide the functionality and leading technologies you d expect in this next generation CI solution. Accelerate workloads to deliver services faster and at a lower cost With proven world-class performance from Fujitsu and truly accelerated enterprise performance on all flash FAS or hybrid storage from NetApp, you can be sure your applications are running as quickly and efficiently as possible. Always optimized to reduce power consumption and energy costs The IT mantra of saving energy is alive and well with NFLEX. Using leading efficient power consumption technologies, NFLEX delivers with a highly efficient system design. Scale with precision and only pay for what you need Expand your system as needed with multi-dimensional scaling through expansion packs. Compute and storage added independently, as you need it, when you need it. Maintain business continuity with zero planned downtime Peace of mind is an NFLEX mainstay, thanks to industry leading, protective layers and redundancies. NFLEX: The Details Fujitsu and NetApp bring together: Flash technology,10gbe, and FCoE support 2 Up to 7 million IOPS with 1ms latencies on All Flash FAS 2 Up to 20x faster enterprise application performance on All Flash FAS 2 PSUs with highest efficiency (94%, Platinum), less power consumption 3 Up to 27% saving on energy costs for cooling and reducing OPEX 4 Reduce power use by 11X and rack space by 19X Cut support costs by up to 67% with NetApp All Flash FAS Patented Coolsafe Advanced Thermal Design % availability even in entry-level systems 5 Redundant, hot-plug components HA under extreme conditions (up to 45 C) ONTAP operating system delivers non-disruptive operations, scalability, and efficiency with zero downtime NFLEX: Bringing Together 2 Industry Leaders Fujitsu Extremely low annual fail rates with minimal downtime 6 Innovative Liquid Cooling technology ranked top 5 in Green500 list world records in price/performance ratio benchmarks, last 7 years 8 Complementary BIOS, firmware and driver updates 9 1st integrated system in the market (FlexFrame for SAP in 2002) NetApp #1 with ONTAP, the world s leading branded storage OS 10 #1 with ONTAP, All Flash Array branded storage OS 11 #1 storage and device management software 11 #1 storage for OpenStack 12 4

5 Complete Confidence Partner with innovative industry leaders to secure your data and grow your business. NFLEX instills the confidence IT leaders are looking for in a Converged Infrastructure solution by reducing time-to-deployment and future-proofing their investment. Protect your investment with a future-proof solution Planning for what-comes-next is simpler thanks to an NFLEX solution based on standard technologies, making it suitable for every environment, with tools you re already familiar and comfortable with using. What s more, NFLEX is easy to leverage across multiple sites, on a global scale. Reduce strategic and operational risk with the longest CI alliance in the industry Take advantage of the Fujitsu NetApp Global Partner Ecosystem and over 20 years of partnership creating innovative solutions together. Protect and secure data Protection and security are second-to-none thanks to NetApp Volume Encryption (NVE), a software-based method to encrypt and protect data from theft if a disk is repurposed, misplaced or stolen, as well as US government certification for data at rest. NFLEX: The Solution Built on technology trusted by thousands of customers worldwide NetApp and Fujitsu bring 20 year history of co-engineering Longest experience in converged infrastructure in the industry - since 2002 Fujitsu Enterprise Service Catalog Manager makes NFLEX Cloud and Hybrid IT Ready NetApp Data Fabric allows operation outside the constraints of the data center, across hybrid cloud resources Fujitsu can provide OEM Virtualization licenses - including support Application-integrated backup, restore and clone life-cycle management with ONTAP helps keep your data secure and ensures compliance with applicable regulations, including SEC17a-4(f) and the new GDPR regulations. Prepare for hybrid cloud with confidence NetApp Data Fabric delivers consistent and integrated hybrid cloud data services for data visibility and insights, data access and control, and data protection and security. NFLEX is fully enabled for hybrid IT by adding Fujitsu s Enterprise Service Catalog Manager, a self-service portal with metering and charging capabilities. 5

6 The Case for CI Converged Infrastructure solutions continue to deliver management and support for Tier 1 and Line of Business applications as well as offering a solid platform for application and data center consolidation. Matt Kimball, Senior Analyst, Servers and Storage with Moor Insights & Strategy shares a perspective on the CI landscape of today and tomorrow, as well as some thoughts on NFLEX s readiness in providing a simple CI solution for IT professionals to deploy. As IT organizations consider hyper-converged infrastructure vs. converged infrastructure, agility must be considered. The as-a-service model of IT that supports a digitally transformed business is dependent on utilizing infrastructure that is designed, built and tuned for simplicity, agility and performance. CI allows the enterprise IT organization to deploy, provision and operationalize compute resources on demand. CI also allows for IT organizations to re-provision and scale resources as the needs of the business evolve. This is the intersect where simplicity meets agility and where performance meets purpose. Both converged infrastructure and hyper-converged infrastructure deliver value to an enterprise IT organization looking to increase time to value and reduce total cost of ownership. While HCI is a strong fit for many use cases, there are likewise many use cases where CI is a better fit. It is important for IT organizations to profile workloads and map to the appropriate underlying architecture. Consider an IT organization deploying Tier 1, core enterprise workloads. The ability to quickly deploy, tear down and scale resources based on the needs of different business units is critical. This is where CI shines. Converged Infrastructure in the enterprise continues to grow rapidly and Moor Insights & Strategy does not see a slowdown due to its unmatched flexibility. This flexibility in purpose can lead to greater TCO savings (vs both traditional infrastructure and HCI) as infrastructure can be re-purposed and scaled for new and emerging workloads as they are introduced into the enterprise on a seemingly daily basis. NFLEX from Fujitsu and NetApp should be strongly considered by Enterprise IT organizations as it combines technology from two market leaders. Customers deploying NFLEX should have a high degree of confidence in this platform delivering on the tenets of CI simplicity, performance and scalability. Where does NFLEX fit best? The NFLEX Converged Infrastructure solution is designed for implementation across any industries and architectures and to fit into just about every enterprise environment. The NFLEX solution from Fujitsu and NetApp provides a foundation for a hybrid cloud strategy, providing even greater cost and workload efficiencies. 6

7 CONCLUSION Empower your business and accelerate value through a Fujitsu and NetApp Converged Infrastructure. NFLEX delivers a simplified experience that s easy to purchase, deploy, run and support. Exceptional capabilities help you gain data center efficiencies to deliver higher value IT services. Have complete confidence by partnering with innovative industry leaders to secure your data and grow your business. For more information, please visit: REFERENCES & ADDITIONAL RESOURCES itic global-server-hardware-server-os-reliability-report.pdf?kui=e2mho3mgyvtusgumkzveva IDC, Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker Q3, November 30, IDC, Worldwide Storage Software and Cloud Services Qview Q3, December 7, OpenStack Survey: NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved. NETAPP, the NETAPP logo, NFLEX and the marks listed at are trademarks of NetApp, Inc. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Fujitsu, the Fujitsu logo and Fujitsu brand names are trademarks or registered trademarks of Fujitsu Limited in Japan and other countries. Other company, product and service names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners, the use of which by third parties for their own purposes may infringe the rights of such owners. Technical data are subject to modification and delivery subject to availability. Any liability that the data and illustrations are complete, actual or correct is excluded. 7