Cisco HyperFlex Climbs to Leader Status in Forrester Wave™ Hyperconverged Infrastructure, Q3 2018

I’m excited to report that Cisco HyperFlex has been named as a new leader in the Forrester Wave™ Hyperconverged Infrastructure, Q3 2018 report. Climbing to the ranks of a leader validates the hard work that has gone into the development and our continuous delivery of innovations to enhance HyperFlex.

We’re just getting started

This year’s Forrester Wave™ report validates our position as a leader in HCI, but we’re just getting started.

In 2016, we launched HyperFlex with a vision to transform the way customers build and manage their datacenters. Our philosophy was to observe the shortcomings of the solutions available at the time, and introduce a product that would redefine the space by deeply co-engineering hardware, software, and networking to provide a seamless experience for the end user.

For us, this meant developing and optimizing the HyperFlex Data Platform, our high performance extensible distributed file system, from the ground up to fully utilize our Cisco UCS compute and networking architecture. By doing this, HyperFlex addressed the shortfalls in first generation HCI offerings, from other vendors, that lacked networking integration and scalable performance. HyperFlex is characterized by a unique architecture integrating the purity and design smarts in the HyperFlex Data Platform deeply co-engineered with optimizations and assists from the unified fabric architecture of the UCS platform. This allows us to deliver performance that is extremely high, extremely consistent, and linearly scaling to support a broad variety of workloads including mission critical enterprise applications like SAP HANA.

Innovations that redefine

Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) has the potential to eliminate the silos associated with traditional compute, storage and virtualization, however, buyers must be cautious not to adopt a solution that makes HCI its own silo in the bigger picture. Cisco holds a unique position in the industry with our ability to provide our customers with a complete end-to-end data center portfolio that includes standalone, converged and hyperconverged infrastructure – all with a consistent fabric and management architecture. Cisco’s unified fabric and unified management across CI and HCI eliminates all silos, enables a elegant migration and co-existence path and eventually provides maximum investment protection for customers.

Cisco is also transforming datacenter operations and management with Intersight which is the industry’s first cloud based management platform that utilizes AIOps to deliver intelligent and proactive management and troubleshooting of datacenter infrastructure. Intersight is a game changer for datacenter management and drastically reduces the time and complexity of datacenter operations.

HyperFlex not only provides immediate benefits to traditional datacenter workloads, it also serves as a future ready platform for emerging use cases such as cloud-native applications and AI/ML workloads. The Cisco Hybrid Cloud Platform for Google Cloud which uses HyperFlex as the private cloud foundation to deliver native kubernetes for hybrid applications is the perfect example of Cisco’s vision to deliver solutions that accelerate datacenter and IT modernization.

Cisco continues to focus on delivering innovations on HyperFlex to power business critical apps and ease adoption of emerging technologies as you continue your digital transformation journey.

…and finally

Our industry moves fast, and it’s easy to get left behind unless there’s a full commitment to delivering continuous innovations that solve hard customer problems. We’ve come a long way in the past two years since HyperFlex was first released. Two years ago, Cisco was named a “Strong Performer” in the 2016 Forrester Wave™ for HCI. This year Cisco has made a significant advancement in our position to be ranked as a “Market Leader” by Forrester in the 2018 Forrester Wave for HCI. The jump in our position between 2016 and 2018 is a testament to Cisco’s innovation and leadership and establishes that we have delivered on our commitment to redefine HCI and will continue to do so.

2018 Forrester Wave: Read the report here

We continue to see tremendous growth in HyperFlex, and as I close this out, I wanted to take a moment to say Thank You to all of our HyperFlex customers who place their trust in Cisco and allow us to partner in their journey of IT transformation!