This past year, many organizations quickly realized the importance of flexible, agile infrastructure. While hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) has been around for some time, the software-defined technology that enables the management of storage, computing power, networking in the data center, became more of a necessity in the “new normal.”
As users became more distributed, so did devices, data, and applications. Now it’s spread across remote workspaces, and data and applications live across public and private cloud environments. This distributed environment has resulted in a focus on “anywhere operations,” which Gartner has named one of the top technology trends for 2021. It requires managing, supporting, and scaling workloads and systems to accommodate this change in how we work.
This is where Cisco Hyperflex really shines. Cisco Hyperflex “maintains critical uptime and streamlines data center maintenance and infrastructure patching,” according to Anthony Rosati, Product Business Manager for Cisco Data Center at SYNNEX Comstor.
We sat down with Rosati to learn more about HyperFlex and highlight what VARs need to know about the solution. He explained here:
EDGE360 Editors: What differentiates HyperFlex from other HCI solutions?
Anthony Rosati: Cisco HyperFlex HCI solutions are highly integrated, fully engineered systems powered by the latest generation of Intel Xeon processors. The solutions provide pre-integrated clusters that include the network fabric, data optimization, unified servers, and choice of hypervisor including VMware ESXi/vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V, enabling fast deployment. This makes them simple to manage and scale. ESG Lab validated that HyperFlex provides consistently high performance for VMware environments running mission-critical workloads. HyperFlex outpaced multiple anonymous competitive solutions with higher IOPS, lower latency, and better consistency over time and across VMs.
Cisco delivers an HCI solution that provides the essential simplicity and cost-efficiency features of HCI, but also the consistently high performance that has been missing—and that customers need for mission-critical workloads.
EDGE360 Editors: What do EDGE partners need to know about this solution?
Rosati: First of all, this solution is award-winning, and for good reason. Cisco HyperFlex was the Overall Winner in the CRN’s 2020 Products of the Year for Hyperconverged Infrastructure. This is the second time it achieved this award in the past two years.
Built on Cisco’s UCS server portfolio, Cisco’s HyperFlex hyperconverged infrastructure system enables the benefits of cloud (such as agility and a pay-as-you-go model) while also supporting distributed computing across multiple sites, all managed via Cisco Intersight and optimized via Intersight Workload Optimizer, which Cisco announced recently.
HyperFlex leverages data optimization technologies and integrated fabric networking to help enable many types of workloads and offers configuration options such as all-flash, all-NVMe, hybrid, and edge.
Key capabilities include comprehensive management via the Cisco Intersight platform, while recent updates have included the launch of the HyperFlex Application Platform. The platform enhances the combination of HyperFlex systems with Kubernetes container orchestration, addressing the issue of how to provide persistent storage to containers.
EDGE360 Editors: Does the EDGE team have any best practices or tips to share?
Rosati: If you currently have a data center practice that is not selling Cisco HyperFlex, please reach out to me for more information or you can start here. We can help you start the process of finding the right folks at Cisco to work with to build your practice. Myself and our engineering team will provide personalized demos and trainings via Cisco dCloud to assist your teams. Cisco is also focusing on helping partners maximize profit by selling HyperFlex solutions. Starting with streamlining the process of obtaining the HyperFlex Specialization, which among other things, provides additional up-front margins and enhanced visibility. Cisco also has multiple offerings for 2021, including Cascade Lakes SmartPlays as well as the MVP Promotion to help partners make up to 20 percent margins for partner lead deals.
Gartner predicts that “IT leaders must adopt an anywhere operations business operating model to reach customers anywhere, enable employees anywhere, and deliver business services anywhere.” HCI will help them do this, and EDGE partners can leverage the award-winning Cisco HyperFlex to enable customer success.
