HyperFlex 3.5 Takes the Stage at Cisco Live 2018 – Make Your Data Center Rock!

Hi there! This is Vijay Venugopal from the HyperFlex Product Management team at Cisco. I’ve been with Cisco for over 12 years and my current role leading product management for HyperFlex has been the most exciting and rewarding part of my career so far. Cisco HyperFlex continues to see great adoption in large enterprise data centers – from the busiest port in the world to one of the largest oil & gas firms in the world. HyperFlex’s flexibility and scalability has also led to strong adoption in mid-market and edge environments such as law firms, medical clinics and manufacturers. Check out some of our customers’ awesome HyperFlex Stories here.

Regardless of the environment or scale HyperFlex is deployed in, the HyperFlex product team is laser focused to Make our Customers’ Data Centers Rock with a flexible infrastructure platform that enables them to power Any App, with Any Cloud, at Any Scale. Back in January 2018 we introduced HyperFlex 3.0: Platform for the Multicloud Era, delivering to our customers one of the largest updates to the HyperFlex Platform. This release enables our customers with a scalable and flexible platform to power more mission critical applications with multicloud services and to extend and distribute their applications to any cloud. On the heels of the recent 3.0 release, our team has been rapidly rocking it away developing an encore that delivers an exciting new set of 3.5 innovations.

HyperFlex 3.5 Takes the Stage

This latest release of HyperFlex delivers our customers a robust platform to power more mission critical applications, with more clouds, and increased performance. In order to rapidly extend the platform further, Cisco has co-innovated with an entire band of technology leaders such as Intel, SAP, Citrix, and NVIDIA. These new innovations continue to change the face of hyperconverged infrastructure, transforming it into a complete platform for multicloud – and there is an entire album of encore innovations:

Introducing Cisco HyperFlex All-NVMe with Intel® Optane NVMe DC SSDs

The Cisco HyperFlex and Intel® Optane teams have co-innovated to introduce one of the industry’s first All-NVMe hyperconverged appliances. The system uses the ultra-fast Intel® Optane NVMe drives for caching and Intel 3D NAND NVMe drives for capacity storage. The Cisco HyperFlex All-NVMe system is starting a completely new performance class for HCI to power more advanced analytics and latency sensitive mission critical applications. This is cranking HCI up to #11 on the amp for all you Spinal Tap fans out there. Learn more from Intel at James Myers’s blog: “Cisco HyperFlex , Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and Intel® Optane SSDs: Co-innovating a new class of performance in Hyperconverged Infrastructure.”

Power AI/ML Workloads on HyperFlex with NVIDIA V100 GPUs

We are rapidly innovating to extend the support of more workloads onto HyperFlex. Customer feedback on the recently introduced Kubernetes containers support in HyperFlex 3.0 has been tremendous and they also want support for more next generation applications on HyperFlex. We have worked with industry leader, NVIDIA, to introduce HyperFlex powered by the powerful Tesla V100 GPUs to create a flexible AI/ML platform for our customers. We also went a step further with NVIDIA –  bringing GPU-aware Kubernetes on Cisco HyperFlex with the Cisco Container Platform. This solution will blow your socks off for AI/ML workloads. Learn More from Cisco and NVIDIA at Francoise Rees’ blog: “Cisco Brings AI/ML Workloads to Hyperconverged Infrastructure.”

Modernize SAP Applications with HyperFlex and Cisco Container Platform

During last week’s SAP Sapphire NOW event we introduced the HyperFlex SAP Modernization Platform. This enables our customers with a flexible common infrastructure platform to power SAP ERP Apps, SAP HANA Databases, SAP Data Hub and eventually SAP Machine Learning. The platform can be flexibly configured with HyperFlex, UCS HANA Compute Nodes, the Cisco Container Platform, and NVIDIA V100 GPUs, optimizing it for our customer’s SAP environments. This will make your SAP environment rock. Learn more about SAP on HyperFlex at cisco.com/go/hxsap and read more about the SAP Data Hub on HyperFlex from Cisco at Kip Compton’s blog: “Unlocking the Power of Enterprise Applications.”

Simplify VDI Deployment and Management on HyperFlex with Citrix Cloud Services

As the final encore in partner co-innovation, Citrix Cloud Services is changing the game in enabling the simplest, fastest, and most secure way to deploy and scale virtualized apps and desktops. Cisco and Citrix have teamed up to deliver this experience to virtualized apps and desktop environments deployed and managed on Cisco HyperFlex. Learn more about this solution at Citrix’s blog “Citrix and Cisco Empower Your Hybrid Cloud for Citrix Workspaces.”

There are many more new features and enhancements in the 3.5 release but here are a few more to highlight:

Native Disaster Recovery Improvements in HyperFlex

When it comes to Data Protection, businesses are looking for simple, yet flexible business continuity solutions. HyperFlex enables a wide variety of Data Protection options, based on the Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) of the business service. We have many new enhancements for the Disaster Recovery operations in a simple to use “1-Click” Test DR Readiness, VM Migration and Disaster Recovery operations.

Cloud-Managed Intersight Innovations with the New Storage Analytics for HyperFlex

Intersight to date has provided real time centralized management and monitoring across all UCS based compute systems including HyperFlex. The newest Intersight Storage Analytics capability will enable real-time monitoring and predictive intelligence from compute, networking, and now from HyperFlex storage. The next HyperFlex release will enable customers to access historical and predictive analytics in Intersight based on telemetry data from the HyperFlex Data Platform. Intersight will be able to track and monitor customer’s compute, network, and storage configurations and provide proactive optimization recommendations.

Making Kubernetes on HyperFlex Even More Robust

In the 3.0 release we introduced new cloud services integrations with HyperFlex and Cisco’s AppDynamics and CloudCenter solutions. Those platforms continue to change the game for containers offering enhancements to allow enterprises to seamlessly deploy, monitor, and optimize their Kubernetes-orchestrated applications both on HyperFlex and in public cloud environments. Learn more about the AppDynamics and Cloud Center releases.

As you can see our teams have been extremely busy innovating internally and with our technology partners. We are excited to put this next release into the hands of our customers soon.

Make Your Data Center Rock with HyperFlex!

-Vijay

Rock out to HyperFlex at Cisco Live Orlando

Headed to Cisco Live? Meet the HyperFlex Team and learn more about the HyperFlex 3.5 release below and in the Cisco Live catalog.