The battle of the software-defined datacentre (SDDC) has been won as customers understand that to embrace the cloud and digital transformation, they must adopt a software-first approach.
The question facing the end user now, is what solution fits in with their goals.
“Datacentres are evolving, modernising and becoming more intelligent, something that has been fuelled by software and in particular hyperconvergence,” states David Odayar, Comstor Datacentre Architecture Lead at Westcon-Comstor Sub-Saharan Africa. “Working with our partners we are starting to see end-user customers mature in this space and are becoming more discerning with regards to the vendors they select. One stand out vendor at this stage is Cisco with its Cisco HyperFlex offering.
“Cisco HyperFlex is the only hyperconverged system to combine compute, storage and network in a single solution. It can be deployed in under an hour and with its automation and management functionality a customer benefits from consistent and powerful performance for their enterprise applications,” adds Odayar.
HyperFlex is engineered on Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) and provides a simplified and seamless way for customers to converge systems in the datacentre and build their own platforms and storage arrays.
With Hyperflex a customer can manage, automate and orchestrate business processes within a single management environment as well as administer and view multiple clouds.
Because it is an adaptive platform the software also enables multi-cloud IT and lets a user power any application anywhere because of the simplicity inherent in hyperconverged infrastructure. It also supports independent scaling, multiple hypervisors and flexible cluster scaling with availability zones.
Odayar says that the next generation Cisco HyperFlex systems available today, have fixed the initial teething problems in older hyperconverged systems, and offers rack and blade servers built with Intel Xeon processors, built-in networking, integrated management, and a high-performance and highly available data platform, with preinstalled software.
“With Cisco HyperFlex systems, you have flexible pools of computing, network and storage resources, that are easy to deploy and maintain. You can also harness the benefits of the pay-as-you-grow economics of the cloud in your on-premise datacentre and support diverse application services and development. HyperFlex also offers one-click integration with a host of virtualization providers for ease of integration and seamless business continuity.
“In short, a hyperconvergence system from Cisco lets our partners build better datacentres that help customers lower IT costs and modernise for containers, the multi-cloud and software defined technologies. Providing what Cisco terms cloud-like agility and simplicity to support any application efficiently with the security and compliance assured by the private cloud,” ends Odayar.