The global all-flash storage market is expected to growth at a CAGR of 58.5% this year, according to IDC, reaching $1.6 billion in spending compared to $300 million in 2012.
As an example of this uptake, Citrix has adopted new automation capabilities provided by Cisco and NetApp to improve efficiency and move further into DevOps.
Today, Cisco and NetApp announced they have added infrastructure automation to their FlexPod product, to which they called FlexPod Advantage.
FlexPod Advantage combines FlexPod with NetApp All Flash FAS storage, Cisco UCS servers with M4 processors and Cisco NEXUS 9K switches with application centric infrastructure (ACI).
The product is aimed at enterprises looking to consolidate mixed workloads and protocols across flash, disk and cloud resources, like Citrix.
Citrix has been using FlexPod with All Flash FAS (AFF) and according to Cisco and NetApp, the company has increased its time to market for the XenApp and XenDesktop virtualisation solutions.
Citrix provides business mobility with mobile workplaces with access to access to apps, desktops, data and communications on any device, over any network and cloud to more than 100 million people globally.
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Cisco and NetApp claim that the FlexPod’s converged infrastructure (CI) augments performance, agility and economic benefits of CI for enterprise databases and virtual environments.
The multiple-hypervisor ready FlexPod, which supports both virtual and physical workloads, has been designed to help enterprise data centres face modern challenges including scalable infrastructure, unified infrastructure management and self-provision.
Cisco and NetApp said that FlexPod with AFF reduces latency by up to 20 times, and a SQL response time of over 200% faster with new server CPUs
According to a company statement, FlexPod provides up to 30% reduction in application testing time and over 80% faster provisioning with application centric infrastructure (ACI).
Mark Peters, practice director and senior analyst at ESG, said: "In the daunting economic climate of today’s IT, converged infrastructure can not only simplify users’ experiences and ROI, but also drive partner profitability."
Jim Kebert, vice president of Avnet’s NetApp solutions business in the Americas, said: "Shifting business pressures and operational limitations are pushing our customers to rethink how they build and manage data centre environments.
"The announcement today is the perfect opportunity for us to continue our focus around the FSA One Framework and the new FlexPod with All Flash FAS to our customers."
Dani Golan, CEO of storage company Kaminario, told CBR: "What is happening today with all-flash storage is probably the biggest revolution in IT maybe since virtualisation.
"If you look at the advancement of any other element ion the data centre, whether it is an application , CPU, memory, and so on, most part of the stack has been designed to last two decades. One part that stayed behind is storage."
He said that the exponential growth of enterprise data in one hand and aging technologies on other hand create a "massive problem of data".
