Cisco Nexus 7000 Design Manual page 10

FlexPod Solution Overview
Fabric Infrastructure Resilience
FlexPod is a highly available and scalable infrastructure that IT can evolve over time to support multiple
physical and virtual application workloads. FlexPod has no single point of failure at any level, from the
server through the network, to the storage. The fabric is fully redundant and scalable and provides
seamless traffic failover should any individual component fail at the physical or virtual layer.
Fabric Convergence
FlexPod components are interconnected through the Cisco Unified Fabric network architecture, which
supports both traditional LAN traffic and all types of storage traffic, including the lossless requirements
for block-level storage transport over FC or FCoE. The Cisco Unified Fabric creates high-performance,
low-latency, and highly available networks, serving a diverse set of data center needs.
FlexPod uses the Cisco Unified Fabric to offer a wire-once environment that accelerates application
deployment. Cisco Unified Fabric also offers the efficiencies associated with infrastructure
consolidation, including:
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Network Virtualization
FlexPod delivers the capability to securely connect virtual machines into the network. This solution
allows network policies and services to be uniformly applied within the integrated compute stack using
technologies such as virtual LANs (VLANs), Quality of Service (QoS), and the Cisco Nexus 1000v
virtual distributed switch. This capability enables the full utilization of FlexPod while maintaining
consistent application and security policy enforcement across the stack even with workload mobility.
FlexPod provides a uniform approach to IT architecture, offering a well-characterized and documented
shared pool of resources for application workloads. FlexPod delivers operational efficiency and
consistency with the versatility to meet a variety of SLAs and IT initiatives, including:
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VMware vSphere 5.1 on FlexPod with Nexus 7000 Using FCoE
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Cost savings from the reduction in switches (LAN/SAN switch ports), associated cabling, rack
space, all of which reduce capital expenditures (capex)
Cost savings on power and cooling, which reduce operating expenses (opex)
Migration to the faster 10 Gigabit Ethernet network, and in the future, to 40 Gigabit Ethernet and
100 Gigabit Ethernet
Evolution to a converged network with little disruption to operations
FlexPod with Cisco Unified Fabric helps you preserve investments in existing infrastructure,
management tools, and staff training and expertise
Simplified cabling, provisioning, and network maintenance to improve productivity and operational
models
Application rollouts or application migrations
Business continuity/disaster recovery
Desktop virtualization
Cloud delivery models (public, private, hybrid) and service models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS)
Asset consolidation and virtualization