FlexPod is a converged infrastructure option developed by NetApp and Cisco. FlexPod is available in streamlined and simplified Express version, and the FlexPod Datacenter edition for enterprise private clouds, VDI, scale-out infrastructure, or software defined data centers.
N/A
Infinio
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
Infinio is VMware Caching Software, from Ignite Technologies. Infinio is designed to deliver lightning-fast I/O for any storage — for the world's fastest VMs.
FlexPod is great for mid to large size companies, where the flexibility and depth of a traditional SAN and high performance servers is required. For smaller companies, it might make more sense to go with a hyper converged solution such as Hyperflex or Nutanix (both of which can still run on Cisco UCS servers, but would not be making use of Netapp storage), to meet the requirements in a smaller footprint.
Infinio is best suited for infrastructure that has high-latency read IO performance challenges. It does nothing to help write IO, so keep in mind the type of workload for which you need to reduce latency. If you have traditional SAS or SATA storage, Infinio has a tremendous impact on the response time of many applications. You can build your cluster's caching pool from either available RAM or an internal drive inside each host. This flexibility helps Infinio to be suitable across many types of environments.
KVM control of the blades still requires Java. Avocent is using HTML5 now, and it would be nice if the KVM console for these UCS blades could too.
Price - Like any Cisco product, there are cheaper options. They aren't nearly as fully featured, but at times, it would be nice if UCS could be a bit cheaper.
Support has always been helpful and responsive. Upgrades can be guided and scheduled so you can be confident that things will go smoothly. The product issues have been minimal and the support team has always done a great job at getting back to me with the recommended fixes that solved my problems.
Being a Cisco shop already it was a natural fit to go with a solution based on their technology. Then add in VMware which we are were already using - that was two out of the three for the FlexPod. Then factor in NetApp's de-duplication technology and flexibility in configuration and options and it's a match made in heaven. Not to say we haven't had some stumbles and some issues but it works and it works well.
Infinio has no real market competition. There was a tool called Pernix FVP that did both read/write acceleration that I evaluated that became end-of-life while it was in POC. It was more complicated to deploy and remove than Infinio and required downtime for each host. Also, the fact that it was no longer supported made the decision to choose Infinio easy.
FlexPod has allowed our team to be extremely quick to resopnd to new VM build requests. The amount of RAM, CPU and backplane offered by B series blades allows us to go with very high VM density. The quick deployment of service profile templates also means that when we have to add new hosts, it is done quicker.
FlexPod and the service profile portability (along with VMware) has allowed for full upgrades and migrations from M1/M2 series hardware to M4 hardware without any downtime or outages to the clients. Blades can be moved into new chassis, or service profiles moved to new generation blades, with no impact to the customers' ability to work.
