The hybrid cloud trend is real and it’s happening fast. An estimated 90% of enterprises worldwide rely on a mix of on-premises/dedicated private clouds, several public clouds, and legacy platforms to meet their infrastructure needs. And market intelligence firm IDC predicts that by 2023 half of enterprise applications will take place in a containerized hybrid cloud environment to provide agility along with a frictionless deployment and management experience.
The events we lived through in 2020—armies of remote workers suddenly coming online, and digital services becoming the primary interface between companies and their customers—have accelerated the hybrid cloud journey for many organizations. This accelerated shift has also highlighted the value of a sound strategy and solution architecture that includes modern, on-premises infrastructure that is nimble, intelligent, and future-proof.
Take for example Cisco’s HyperFlex strategy. It’s based on three key concepts, each designed to help bridge the gaps between the capabilities of a company’s IT organization and the needs of the business to thrive in an always-on digital world.
The first concept: IT teams should adopt a cloud operations platform to enable a portfolio of services that deliver intelligent visualization, optimization, and orchestration for applications and infrastructure across the entire hybrid cloud environment. Cisco Intersight, for instance, provides a single control point to consistently automate across highly distributed infrastructure resources, while maintaining real-time visibility and insights on the relationship between applications and infrastructure that impacts performance and costs.
Second, IT organizations need the capability to deliver any app, at any location, at any scale, predictably and securely. This starts with modern, on-premises infrastructure that enables cloud-like agility so the business can quickly provide applications and offer differentiated digital services to customers.
Third, IT teams benefit from a scalable and adaptable infrastructure that lets them build private clouds that can adjust to ever-changing business needs. This affords organizations the ability to address both modern data center and emerging edge scenarios by scaling in any dimension to satisfy application requirements.
To support these business outcomes and to expand HyperFlex’s hybrid cloud use cases, Cisco continues to evolve the HyperFlex portfolio with advances such as a software-only version, an integrated Kubernetes open-source platform, container storage services, edge computing solutions, and more.
Boosting Choice and Flexibility for IT Teams
Cisco engineered HyperFlex to support a broad, open ecosystem across its technology partners. It offers a seamless experience by tightly integrating hardware and software into a HyperFlex appliance to deliver the performance and scalability to power any application, anywhere.
The company recently introduced a software-only version that lets customers run HyperFlex software on existing and new Cisco UCS servers, third-party and white box servers that include ruggedized from factors, and eventually in the public cloud—enabling a consistent experience across the data center, edge, and cloud. The company will extend its “Cisco Validated” program to test and validate HyperFlex on third-party servers, allowing customers to pick the server platforms of their choice, while providing Cisco-certified solutions they can adopt with confidence.
Although the company will continue to offer and expand its appliance offerings, this new capability broadens the possibilities for IT teams. Scheduled for delivery this year, the software-only version of HyperFlex will enable Cisco to offer one of the most comprehensive hyperconverged infrastructure portfolios in the industry.
Other new product releases augment this portfolio, as well. For example, the HyperFlex Application Platform and Intersight Kubernetes Service now offer an integrated Kubernetes platform for production-grade cloud native applications. This new platform simplifies the use of Kubernetes for IT and DevOps teams by curating open-source tooling, automating routine tasks, and providing full-stack lifecycle management. And deeper integration with Kubernetes Container Storage Interface (CSI) results in expanded storage capabilities for containerized applications.
New iSCSI (Internet Small Computer Systems Interface) support extends the HyperFlex Data Platform’s performance, storage efficiency, and resiliency outside of the HyperFlex cluster. Now, with support for iSCSI targets, any bare metal, virtualized, or containerized applications, within or outside the cluster, can now use the platform’s storage features.
In addition, new edge computing solutions, the HyperFlex Edge 240 and HyperFlex Edge 240 SD, expand IT teams’ choices. The HX Edge 240 includes more disk and GPU support for use cases such as inferencing at the edge. The HX Edge 240 SD is a compact solution designed to fit in small spaces.
Finally, Cisco built in native replication capability, where multiple source clusters use a destination cluster to store replication copies. New secure boot and secure shell features ensure a trusted, more protected environment.
HyperFlex continues to be instrumental in data center modernization initiatives and serve as the foundation of a modern hybrid cloud operation that spans on-premises private clouds, public cloud services, and edge computing environments. It’s no wonder that Cisco was recognized as a leader in the 2020 Forrester Wave for hyperconverged infrastructure.
To learn more about Cisco HyperFlex visit www.cisco.com/go/hyperflex.
Cisco HyperFlex or Cisco UCS systems with Intel® Xeon® Platinum processor
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This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Cisco.
