FlexPod Datacenter with Citrix VDI
FlexPod® is a proven and trusted enterprise solution from NetApp and Cisco. IT leaders who need to run business-critical applications appreciate its robustness, scalability, ease of management, and hybrid cloud capabilities. In today’s digital era, customers are looking to meet all of their remote solution needs so that their workloads can function seamlessly at scale across the globe while reducing operational and capital costs and providing a superior end-user experience.
FlexPod for VDI
Our current challenging environment has resulted in a sudden increased need for employees and students to work and learn remotely. As a result, governments and corporations want to deploy new virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments or expand their existing VDI environments to provide their users with fast and secure remote access.
To meet these fast-changing needs, Cisco and NetApp, through their FlexPod partners, deliver standardized converged infrastructure for VDI. FlexPod can handle mission-critical VDI applications from hundreds to tens of thousands of users. In addition, VDI and other enterprise and cloud workloads use the same FlexPod architectural model with its industry-leading standardized components such as NetApp® AFF and FAS storage arrays, Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) servers, and Cisco Nexus switches.
Customer adoption of hybrid cloud has increased recently to get higher reliability, reduced risk, faster application response time, lower operating costs, and faster time to market. FlexPod's fundamental capabilities, reliability, performance, and efficiency with a lower TCO will help customers achieve the outcomes they are looking for with the hybrid multi-cloud deployments.
FlexPod VDI solutions support VDI users like task workers, knowledge workers, and power users for their primary VDI use cases in application migration, virtual workstations, and remote desktop shared hosts. Customers can start small with a solution to support few concurrent workers and scale up. Or they can mix and match to support their entire agency and workforce.
FlexPod UCS features for VDI
The Cisco Unified Compute System (Cisco UCS) X-Series is a brand-new modular compute system, configured and managed from the cloud.
Key advantages of integrating Cisco UCS X-Series into the FlexPod:
- Simpler and programmable infrastructure: infrastructure as a code delivered through a single partner-integrable open API
- Fabric innovations: PCIe/Compute Express Link (CXL) topology for heterogeneous compute and memory composability
- Innovative cloud operations: continuous feature delivery and no need for maintaining on-premises virtual machines to support management functions
- Cisco Intersight: Cisco Intersight, is a cloud-based solution with secure appliance capabilities that have the ability to manage various environments from one single location
ONTAP features for VDI
- NetApp AFF arrays provide industry-leading storage solutions that efficiently handle the most demanding I/O bursts, profile management, and user data management, to help reduce storage costs per desktop.
- NetApp Clustered Data ONTAP® software enables you to seamlessly add, upgrade, or remove storage from the infrastructure to meet the needs of the virtual desktops.
- NetApp ONTAP 9 data management software enables you to modernize your infrastructure and transition to a cloud-ready data center with a common set of data services and 99.9999% availability.
- NetApp Active IQ® Unified Manager is a comprehensive monitoring and proactive management tool for ONTAP systems to help manage the availability, capacity, protection, and performance risks of your storage systems and virtual infrastructure.
- Data Protection: NetApp Volume Encryption (NVE) allows ONTAP to encrypt data for each volume for granularity. NetApp Aggregate Encryption (NAE) allows ONTAP to encrypt data for each volume, and the volumes can share keys across the aggregate.
New Cisco Validated design release on FlexPod Datacenter with Citrix VDI Link
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