FlexPod, a joint integrated infrastructure product from Cisco and NetApp, has generated $3 billion in joint sales since its 2010 launch, the two companies announced today. Unit shipments have grown 81 percent year-over-year to annualized run rate of $2 billion. The companies also said FlexPod units have been deployed to over 4,100 customers in more than 100 countries.

Integrated infrastructure systems are all-in-one computing platforms that combine processors,  storage networking and systems software. They are intended for applications that require high availability and scalability. FlexPod includes Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) servers, NetApp unified storage systems and Cisco Nexus networking fabric.

Wikibon says  converged infrastructure is becoming a significant portion of enterprise IT infrastructure. “Cisco UCS and its many storage partnerships have led this trend,” said Wikibon Senior Analyst Stu Miniman. Gartner predicts that the integrated systems market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 56.3 percent through 2016 and International Data Corp. said the market grew 68.5% in the third quarter of last year.

Cisco and NetApp have pushed their integrated infrastructure technology aggressively, signing up more than 1,000 channel partners and recruiting players like Oracle, Microsoft, Splunk, SAP, and Citrix to validate their software on FlexPod. All of this is part of a three-year plan that Cisco and NetApp set in motion in January of last year, aimed at bringing “next-generation cloud-integrated data center design” into the forefront.

“FlexPod can be a significant driver of customer technology adoption,” Miniman said. “NetApp sees a might higher percentage of their customers using Clustered ONTAP with FlexPod than average. Cisco will leverage the FlexPod solution set to help drive ACI [Advanced Centric Infrastructure] adoption.” He added that FlexPod is supported by VMware while both bare-metal and Microsoft Hyper-V are increasing in FlexPod deployments.

In a joint press release, the companies said US accounting firm KSM used FlexPod to improve virtualization performance and eliminate downtime, resulting in a 95 percent reduction in the time it takes to search customer records. Another customer, Salford City Council in England, increased server capacity by 50 percent while slashing energy costs by half, the companies claimed.

FlexPod is a joint converged compute, networking and storage solution provided by Cisco and NetApp. It includes the FlexPod Datacenter for large enterprises, Flexpod Express for small and medium businesses and FlexPod Select, which offer high-capacity and high performance solutions for specialized workloads.