Cisco Enhances HyperFlex Portfolio

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Cisco’s latest HyperFlex portfolio updates – HyperFlex 3.0 and multicloud services – introduced Thursday, will up the ante for the vendor’s data-center partners authorized to sell Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS).

The new software enhancements include support for Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor, increased cluster scale with automated resiliency, and new multicloud services, allowing any application tiers to be deployed, monitored and managed in any cloud, Cisco said. The result is a platform that enables deployment and development of traditional and cloud-native applications on a common hyperconverged platform.

IDC’s Eric Sheppard

In its most recent quarterly tracker, IDC reported that converged system revenue, worldwide, increased almost 11 percent year over year.

“The converged systems market expanded on multiple fronts, most notably within hyperconverged solutions,” said Eric Sheppard, research director, enterprise storage and converged systems at IDC. “While hyperconvergence is not the sole source of market growth, it has undeniably driven an expansion of this market into new environments at a very rapid pace,” he wrote.

For partners, the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform represents a new model of selling, Scott Mohr, director for data center and cloud, with Cisco’s global partner organization, told us.

“It’s not just reselling the technology anymore, but rather managed services, to continue to expand the offer,” Mohr said. “All of the various pieces build on top of one another for a cloud-like infrastructure that continues to lead to another service.”

He also noted that recurring revenue streams, new consumption models, multicloud cross selling, and containerized programmability add up to even more partner opportunities.

Hyperflex comes with a year of Intersight – management in the cloud – potentially leading to one-, three-, or five-year subscription options, Mohr said. The company also updated all rebate programs and Smartplay Bundle programs to include Hyperflex 3.0.

Cisco rolled out Intersight in September. The new systems-management service was developed to solve multiple customer problems, i.e. increased complexity resulting from distributed application architectures and physical and virtual infrastructure sprawl; complexity that’s outstripping IT’s capability to manage it in real time; and the fact that traditional systems management developed in a pre-cloud world just doesn’t work.

Cisco touts the HyperFlex portfolio as simple and able to run any application, on any cloud, at any scale.

The HX 3.0 software update offers application enhancements for multi-hypervisor support, containers volume driver, and enterprise application validation for mission-critical database, analytic, and ERP applications including Oracle, SAP, Microsoft and Splunk.

New service integrations with Cisco’s multicloud software portfolio include: AppDynamics for Hyperflex for application performance monitoring; Cisco Workload Optimization Manager for application placement; CloudCenter for HyperFlex, introduced last year, for cloud mobility; and CloudCenter for HyperFlex, which enables private cloud self-service IaaS capabilities for developers and administrators.