Kathy Gibson is at the Cisco Small Business Summit in Sandton –Traditional infrastructure can be complex and is typically siloed, a challenge that hyperconvergence aims to simplify and streamline.
Cisco’s Hyperflex offering aims to help customers move to a hybrid cloud and multicloud era.
Antonio dos Santos, part of the data centre team at Cisco, explains that Cisco Hyperflex brings together Cisco DX Platform, Cisco Fabric Computing and Cisco Hybrid Cloud Management together into the Cisco Hyperconvergence Infrastructure (HCI).
It uses off-the-shelf rack servers, offering cloud-like economics cloud-like scalability, cloud-like simplicity in deployment and operations, and support for enterprise applications like VDI, VSI, ROBO and database.
By abstracting all the complexity away from cloud, and offering almost limitless scaling, Cisco’s HyperFlex offers cloud in a box for customers.
“Late last year, we announced that we are now in the Gartner Leaders Quadrant for HCI,” Dos Santos adds.
“Plus, we are delivering new features every quarter on both the hardware and software layers.”
Cisco Hyperflex allows for dynamic data distribution. Dos Santos explains that reads and writes are striped to every node in the cluster, providing predictable performance and guaranteeing Cisco customers to the best possible HCI performance.
This also ensures that space utilisation is balanced and no data migration is needed.
Simplified scaling is built into Cisco Hyperflex. “The customer can scale in a very seamless way,” Dos Santos explains.
Customers simply add nodes as required, and the system balances workloads and data across all nodes.
“Distributed scale and performance is what we are targeting with Hyperflex.”
Importantly, Hyperflex is on an aggressive software cadence, with updates every quarter.
The solution started with hyperconvergence for the core, migrated to any app, any scale, in 3.0 it became capable of multicloud hyperconvergence. The latest release is Hyperflex Anywhere, providing ultralight edge clusters.
Hyperflex Anywhere is now Cisco addresses HCI for smaller organisations.
Two deployment models include Hyperflex Edge for two- to four-node ultra-light implementations. This could scale up to Cisco Hyperflex with up to 64 nodes.
HCI at the edge demand flexibility, says Dos Santos, and Hyperflex Edge 4.0, optimised for small businesses, lets customers size their edge as they need it, scaling from two nodes to four nodes.
Customers can either bring their own networking, or Cisco can supply networking as part of the HCI solution.
Hyperflex Edge allows for completely lights-out deployment. Customers can crate rapid cluster and profiles as well as full stack upgrades.
Flexible scalability and investment protection is built-in, along with connected TAC support.
Cisco Intersight allows customers to focus on running their business while Cisco worries about their HCI environment. Through centralised cloud-based management, management is made super simple, Dos Santos adds.
“Cisco’s aim is to deliver applications in the most simple and seamless way possible for customers,” he says.
Cisco Data Centre helps customers to deliver apps that accelerate digital transformation, powered by intent base networking and delivered across the multi-cloud, he concludes.
