Cisco HyperFlex Offers a Solution for Every Industry
From retail to healthcare, diverse industries turn to hyperconverged infrastructure to manage compute, storage and networking functions.
The world of enterprise computing is transforming rapidly, from an environment focused on assembling diverse hardware components into one that is focused on providing outstanding services using consolidated platforms. Driven by the adoption of public cloud computing, enterprise technology customers have come to expect on-demand access to an agile computing infrastructure. Many are simply no longer willing to wait for technologists to build out specifications for systems, order components and assemble a purpose-built solution.
Security and budgetary concerns often drive organizations to attempt to recreate these environments in their own data centers. This can be a formidable challenge, as it still leaves technologists in the difficult position of attempting to select, acquire and integrate components from multiple vendors.
Cisco’s HyperFlex platform seeks to solve this problem. The strategy: Give enterprises a hardware platform that combines computing, storage and networking into a single infrastructure and meets modern demands for agility, efficiency and adaptability. As the market moves toward a hyperconverged computing model, HyperFlex stands out with a unique, end-to-end, software-defined infrastructure approach that lets technologists rapidly assemble the resources they need to meet business requirements. The integrated platform achieves this goal in a manner that delivers high performance, ease of use and rapid deployment capability.
Many enterprises cite cost as a barrier to building out effective private cloud and hyperconverged solutions. Cisco’s modular approach to the HyperFlex platform solves this problem by letting organizations adapt the pay-as-you-grow model of the public cloud to on-premises infrastructure. With HyperFlex, organizations can quickly reallocate resources between computing environments. As aggregate compute, storage and networking needs grow, an organization can add capacity to the HyperFlex environment by simply adding the required modules to existing hardware. In this way, HyperFlex brings the cloud’s economic model to private data centers.
Diverse Use Cases
The hyperconverged approach to data center management that HyperFlex offers is suited to organizations in a range of industries. Healthcare, education, manufacturing and retail/hospitality entities, among others, are finding value in hyperconvergence. For HyperFlex, some of the more common use cases include creating virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), server virtualization, test and development environments, and supporting large, remote offices.
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure: Many organizations investigated VDI solutions years ago, but turned away from them because of high upfront costs and the complexity of building out supporting infrastructure. HyperFlex eliminates these barriers, letting organizations start VDI initiatives with low upfront costs, consistent performance and predictable scaling. For example, a health care entity seeking a secure desktop solution could use HyperFlex to deliver a consistent desktop experience to doctors, nurses and administrators.
Server Virtualization: HyperFlex reduces the operational complexity of traditional server virtualization environments. Technologists no longer need to develop separate approaches to compute, storage and networking. Instead, they can depend on HyperFlex to provide consistent performance and predictable scaling in a unified environment. For example, a retailer who experiences bursts in seasonal activity might reallocate virtual server resources to meet changing demand, adding focused compute and storage capacity as needed.
Test and Development: Developers find themselves under increasing pressure to rapidly deploy solutions to business challenges. This becomes difficult when they must work with computing, storage, networking and virtualization teams to provision the hardware they need to support test and development applications. In a hyperconverged environment, developers can provision their own resources on an agile basis and reconfigure virtualized hardware as they iterate through frequent code revisions. HyperFlex also offers instant cloning and snapshot capabilities that facilitate test and development environments. For example, a social media company might deploy HyperFlex to provide developers with on-demand access to test environments.
Large, Remote Branch Offices: Many organizations find themselves growing in geographic diversity as they open offices around the globe. HyperFlex provides a simple way to deploy hardware where it is needed and manage it from a central location. Technologists no longer need to engage in “fly-and-fix” missions to correct hardware issues in remote offices, instead resolving most problems from the comfort of their own offices. Colleges and universities, for example, might deploy HyperFlex to meet the computing needs of international branch campuses, supported by the technology team on the main campus. To read more about HyperFlex, download our white paper, "Cisco HyperFlex Transforms Data Center Management."
Cisco HyperFlex
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