Why Cisco Customers LOVE Extending UCS Deployments with HyperFlex

Hi again! You may have heard by now that Cisco’s Hyperconverged Infrastructure – Cisco HyperFlex Systems – has been engineered on Cisco UCS, and in this blog I will share what it means to you. In nutshell, engineering HyperFlex on UCS not only allows you to extend existing tools and skillset to hyperconvergence, but also provides the platform to create the most adaptive and flexible hyperconverged solution in the market.

Cost Efficiency

Cisco HyperFlex provides the unique ability to truly scale resources independently. When you need to scale just compute, for example in non-persistent VDI deployments, you can simply add UCS blades or racks that join the hyperconverged resources as compute-only nodes. This is done with our IOvisor, a VIB that provides a network file system (NFS) mount point to vSphere, effectively adding these servers to the unified pool of available resources. You don’t have to pay the high cost of disks and software in additional nodes, significantly lowering your overall TCO by truly adapting resources to the needs of your specific environment.

Convenience and Flexibility

One of the benefits of running on the same UCS platform is that you can leverage existing assets in the your datacenter. Continuing the example of expanding the hyperconverged cluster, you can grab an existing UCS B200, C220 or C240 and add them as compute-only nodes. Once the VIB is deployed, these compute-only nodes become part of the joint pool.

Dynamic Resource Utilization

Another key aspect of this model is the ability to shift these resources across Hyperconverged (HCI) and converged or traditional infrastructure. The compute-only nodes can be used to support the hyperconverged cluster, and based on seasonal or daily application demands they can also be shifted to support your traditional infrastructure, providing true cloud-like agility across your datacenter.

Leverage Existing Skillset

Too often hyperconverged solutions don’t play well within your datacenter, requiring separate management paradigms dedicated to hyperconverged clusters. By engineering HyperFlex on UCS we allow you to extend the popular UCS Manager policy management to HyperFlex clusters. Both deployment and expansion processes leverage UCS service profiles, streamline daily operations and increase overall infrastructure consistency and reliability across the datacenter. HyperFlex nodes are managed like any other UCS server in your datacenter.