Rob Soderbery - VP of Enterprise Products and Services, Cisco
Multi-national technology company, Cisco, is increasing its focus into the datacentre space with the launch of solutions in three areas – networking, hyperconverged infrastructure, and hybrid Cloud orchestration.
It said the solutions will enable application-centric hybrid Cloud deployments.
Cisco unveiled Cisco HyperFlex Systems, a solution built on its UCS compute platform, which brings a new architectural approach to hyperconverged infrastructure. The HyperFlex portfolio extends Cisco’s UCS and converged infrastructure businesses and was developed through an alliance with a US start-up, Springpath.
This expands Cisco’s portfolio of complete software-defined infrastructure – from compute with UCS, network with ACI and SDN solutions, to now HyperFlex for storage.
The solution aims to simplify policy-based automation across network, compute and storage for enterprise applications.
Cisco said HyperFlex surpasses first generation hyperconverged solutions, which were severely limited in terms of the performance, flexibility, and operational simplicity required by today’s IT environment of micro-services, containers, new applications and Clouds.
“There is a lot of talk in the industry about the hyperconverged space and it’s because it is easy to deploy and get to market. It is the core of what our customers want today,” says Rob Soderbery, VP of Enterprise Products and Services, Cisco.
“Everybody wants IT to be simpler, and hyperconverged does just that. We believe this is an architectural approach that our customers can take advantage of and is the foundation of digital transformation.”
Cisco has also launched SDN-ready Nexus switches – the new Nexus 9000 switches, software enhancements that enable ACI support for Cisco Nexus 7000 switches, and new Cisco Nexus 3000 datacentre switches.
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The company said that it said delivers Cloud-scale 10/25/40/50/100Gpbs, with performance improvements at “industry leading price points”.
Cisco Insieme business unit senior vice-president, Soni Jiandani, said the new switching platforms provide the scale, telemetry, security, and performance needed for distributed containers and micro-services.
“As the industry moves towards a hybrid Cloud model, it’s bout an influx of existing applications that customers are bringing to their Clouds. With this, we want to take an approach where we can enable our customers with a top down and bottom up way of managing it.”
In addition, Cisco has also announced automation with Cisco Nexus Fabric Manager; Cloud Services at Cloud Scale with Cloud Economics; and an expanded ACI Ecosystem with Infoblox, N3N, Tufin, vArmour, and Veritas.
The launches are the first of many hardware and software innovations Cisco is rolling out in 2016.
Cisco global partner organisation vice-president, Ken Trombetta, said the goal is to help customers achieve secure, highly simplified, scalable and cost effective datacenters that keep pace with the speed of business, and accelerate adoption of hybrid Cloud environments.
“Cisco’s new datacentre and Cloud solutions will enable our partners to help their customers as they evolve to application-centric data center infrastructure and also address the requirements for DevOps and application developers.
“We believe this will expand the opportunity for new revenue streams and professional services for Cisco partners,” he added.
ARN’s Hafizah Osman is at the Cisco Partner Summit 2016 in San Diego as a guest of the company.
