Cisco and NetApp Celebrate Five Years of FlexPod Customer Success

Shared Revenue for FlexPod Integrated Infrastructure Reaches $5.6 Billion as Customers and Partners Embrace Solution that Speeds Business Success

SAN JOSE and SUNNYVALE, Calif. - October 13, 2015 - Cisco and NetApp, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTAP) today marked five years of delivering unprecedented value to customers with FlexPod integrated infrastructure solutions.

The NetApp and Cisco FlexPod collaboration - has helped simplify and modernize enterprise IT so that organizations can achieve better business outcomes. FlexPod customers benefit from proven technology, a strong partner ecosystem and the ability to rapidly integrate new innovations. Customers and partners can choose from more than 100 validated application and infrastructure designs that increase productivity, speed decision making and produce stronger business results.

In its first five years, FlexPod has experienced incredible growth, generating shared revenues of $5.6 billion. Today, more than 6,300 customer organizations and 1,100 partners worldwide have experienced how FlexPod lets them reimagine what technology can do.

Competition for customers is fierce. Requirements for responsiveness, availability and speed have never been higher. In FlexPod, Cisco and NetApp have created the ideal solution to meet these evolving business demands, said George Kurian, CEO of NetApp. The capabilities of Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite and NetApp Data Fabric enable customers to seamlessly extend their IT systems from the private cloud to the public cloud, on their terms. Customers can be confident that their investments in FlexPod today will enable their businesses to succeed and evolve with the changing business and IT landscape.

Cisco and NetApp share the same vision to empower every country, city and company to become digital. To do this, IT organizations need a simpler approach to deploy and manage infrastructure. Together, FlexPod and Ciscos partner network improve deployment time and prepare customers for the next wave of data center transformation, said Chuck Robbins, CEO of Cisco.

Partners and Customers Share their FlexPod Experience

As NetApp's #1 FlexPod Partner for three years, ePlus has proven our success and expertise in designing, implementing and managing hundreds of FlexPods for our customers around the United States. Every day we hand-craft agile data centers and cloud solutions that deliver more to our customers. With FlexPod's amazing flexibility and the breadth of different workloads it already supports today, we're excited about the next five years, said Mark Melvin, chief technology officer of ePlus.

Patrick Goemaere, CTO of Virdata, a Technicolor Company, commented Our solution uses a FlexPod private cloud infrastructure for easy, modular scalability for both hybrid and on premise solutions. Running the NetApp Data ONTAP operating system, FlexPod gives Virdata a world-leading capability that eases capacity planning and that provides a validated reference platform. Virdata's IoT and Spark-enabled big data analytics services can now also operate within a secure, multi-tenant environment that spans the entire hardware, network and storage domains.

Mercy built a state-of-the-art data center and implemented a flexible cloud infrastructure to effectively deploy and support an electronic health record for storing and protecting patient information, and now for extending to smaller clinics and healthcare systems, said Scott Richert, vice president of enterprise services at Mercy. With the help of the NetApp FlexPod architecture, we have saved over 40 percent of storage space, reduced power consumption by 50 percent, and now provide rapid access to and data protection for millions of patients.

People were coming to our team asking us to test the impact of their ideas on our complex banking environment. We could only test so many projects at once, so we had long lead times. As a strategic priority, we needed to deliver innovation faster, said Ben Issa, head of IT Strategy, ING DIRECT Australia. Cisco's server infrastructure helps us break down data center silos and establish a single compute platform that's completely integrated with those of other vendors. It's integrated with NetApp technologies, which help us off-load the storage seamlessly behind the scenes without overloading our infrastructure, saving a huge amount of network bandwidth, storage space, and processing power. For one environment that's a saving-when you're deploying many concurrently, it's critical.

Specifically for the racetrack, we needed a small and lightweight system that can be easily flown from one place to the next. It had to be extremely reliable and deliver the performance required for demanding graphics applications. With our mobile FlexPod data center, we can implement this highly efficiently, said a representative of Sauber Motorsport AG. Without FlexPod, and with only conventional technology, a data center of this type would be extremely difficult to realize, and the cost of resources would certainly be higher.

Expanding FlexPod Capabilities

Backed by one of the most successful alliances in the industry, FlexPod has quickly become the integrated infrastructure of choice for many of the largest enterprises around the globe. NetApp and Cisco, with their partners, continue to expand FlexPod capabilities to address new business requirements.

FlexPod validated designs for Application Performance, Cloud, and Automation:

FlexPod with NetApp All Flash FAS and Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) delivers increased application performance without downtime, driving higher productivity, operational efficiency, and smart decision making. This design supports the entire software development lifecycle with easy, low-friction switching across flash, disk and cloud resources for i

LINK:	http://www.netapp.com/us/company/news/press-releases/news-rel-20151016...
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