FlexPod and SAP: Powering Sustainable, High-Performance Data Centers
Key Takeaways
⇨ FlexPod, designed by Cisco and NetApp, provides a sustainable data center solution with reduced energy consumption and elongated hardware lifespans, enabling efficient performance for mission-critical SAP applications.
⇨ The prevalidated architecture of FlexPod facilitates faster and cost-effective SAP deployments, allowing businesses to scale efficiently while minimizing implementation risks and enhancing operational reliability.
⇨ FlexPod supports hybrid and multi-cloud strategies, providing flexibility for SAP users to integrate with major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, while avoiding vendor lock-in and maintaining control over their on-premise infrastructure.
In today’s digital economy, enterprises are challenged with the constant need for consistent performance of disparate applications while keeping up with demand. Many business customers want to run their mission-critical SAP applications on a data center that is dependable, future-proof, validated, and proven for enterprise workloads. FlexPod from Cisco and NetApp is an established data center solution that checks all the boxes.
Sustainability by Design
FlexPod, designed by Cisco and NetApp with a focus on long-term sustainability, combines reduced energy consumption with extended hardware lifespans. For example, the Cisco UCS X-Series minimizes complexity while supporting future innovations such as liquid cooling, energy-efficient CPUs, and advanced interconnect systems. This collaboration between Cisco and NetApp delivers a solution that balances high performance, scalability, and energy efficiency, helping to significantly reduce data center footprints.
FlexPod’s modular architecture allows for workload consolidation, reducing data center footprints through denser designs and advanced data reduction technologies. For instance, the FlexPod modular storage design combined with NetApp storage technology delivers unparalleled flexibility and ultrahigh density, outperforming other storage solutions.
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FlexPod for SAP: Performance Meets Sustainability
FlexPod customers get cost-effective, faster SAP deployments, right-sized and ready to scale. A single point of management through Cisco Intersight makes FlexPod a preferred infrastructure for SAP that can add valuable insights into your infrastructure and data. FlexPod is hybrid-cloud ready, so customers can work with all major hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services, Azure, and Google Cloud.
FlexPod’s prevalidated infrastructure, including compute and networking technology from Cisco, data storage and services from NetApp, and virtualization technology from VMware, is ready to deploy immediately in preconfigured options or can be customized to meet customers’ needs. This flexibility makes FlexPod an ideal platform for customers to operate business functions and tackle digital transformation simultaneously.
Future-Ready Infrastructure
FlexPod’s design offers significant benefits by consolidating workloads that run on aging, inefficient hardware. This consolidation reduces data center footprints through denser designs and advanced data reduction technologies. For example, the FlexPod modular storage design combined with NetApp storage technology delivers unparalleled flexibility and ultrahigh density, outperforming other storage solutions.
On the compute side, the Cisco UCS X-Series chassis features a midplane-free design that simplifies physical connections, so nodes or modules can be added or replaced effortlessly, without requiring architectural modifications.
FlexPod is more than a sustainable solution for today—it is a forward-looking investment that aligns with long-term environmental objectives. By integrating FlexPod into your SAP landscape, you not only enhance performance and scalability but also contribute to a more sustainable and efficient data center infrastructure.
What This Means for SAPinsiders
Invest in validated infrastructure to accelerate SAP deployments. FlexPod’s prevalidated architecture—combining Cisco compute, NetApp storage, and VMware virtualization—enables faster, right-sized SAP deployments that reduce implementation risk and speed time-to-value. For organizations undergoing SAP modernization, adopting a solution that is already tuned for SAP workloads ensures both operational reliability and cost efficiency.
Use infrastructure consolidation to reduce environmental and operational costs. By consolidating SAP and other enterprise workloads on FlexPod, companies can minimize their data center footprint, reduce energy usage, and extend hardware life cycles. The UCS X-Series and NetApp storage systems support high-density deployments, delivering performance gains while advancing sustainability goals—a dual imperative for modern IT leaders.
Enable cloud-ready flexibility without vendor lock-in. FlexPod supports hybrid and multi-cloud strategies, giving SAP users the ability to integrate with hyperscalers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud while maintaining control over on-premise infrastructure. This flexibility allows for gradual cloud migration and greater agility in meeting changing business demands, without the risk of overcommitting to a single cloud vendor.
