Cisco has announced data centre technology innovations in three key areas: networking, hyper-converged infrastructure, and hybrid cloud orchestration which will enable application-centric hybrid cloud deployments. Cisco continues to lead data centre innovation with SDN-ready Nexus switches that deliver cloud scale 10/25/40/50/100Gpbs, with up to 10 times performance improvement at industry leading price points. The new switching platforms provide the scale, telemetry, security, and performance needed for distributed containers and micro-services, as well as the lossless traffic needed for IP storage and hyper-converged infrastructure. The new switches give Cisco customers a two-year innovation advantage over competitive technology.
Cisco also unveiled Cisco HyperFlex Systems, built on Cisco’s industry-leading UCS compute platform, which brings a new architectural approach to hyper-converged infrastructure. Cisco HyperFlex Systems simplify policy-based automation across network, compute and storage for the widest set of enterprise applications. Cisco HyperFlex surpasses first generation hyper-converged 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. 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.
Earlier this year, Cisco announced its intent to acquire CliQr Technologies Inc. The CliQr CloudCenter platform will provide customers with comprehensive yet simplified, application-centric orchestration for private, hybrid and public clouds. CliQr provides customers with a single, intuitive platform that helps customers manage the entire application lifecycle across hybrid IT environments, whether simple or complex. The CliQr platform ties business applications to heterogeneous data centre infrastructure, running across bare-metal, containers and virtualised environments.
These announcements are the first of many hardware and software innovations Cisco plans to bring to market in 2016. The goal is to help customers achieve highly secure, simplified, scalable and cost-effective data centres that keep pace with the speed of business, and accelerate adoption of hybrid cloud environments.
Cisco HyperfFlex Systems
Based on Cisco’s UCS technology, Cisco HyperfFlex Systems represent the next generation in hyper-converged infrastructure with a leap in technology that delivers the industry’s first complete end-to-end hyper-converged solution. The HyperFlex portfolio extends Cisco’s UCS and converged infrastructure businesses, which together have over 50,000 customers worldwide. The HyperFlex series makes an ideal platform for customers deploying enterprise applications in their data centres, and for remote and branch offices where hyper-converged infrastructure is expected to become a multi-billion industry over the next three to four years.
Cisco Next Generation Nexus Switches and Software: Speed and Telemetry
Cisco’s ASIC innovations power its next generation switches, enabling customers for the first time to transition to 25/50/100Gbps at the cost and density of today’s 10/40Gbps networks, with an increase of up to 10 times the bandwidth.
The new Nexus 9000 switches deliver:
- Industry leading performance for 100Gbps, with 25% more non-blocking performance, at 50 percent the cost of comparable solutions, plus greater reliability and lower power
- Real time network telemetry at 100Gbps wire rate, enabling network security with pervasive NetFlow and fabric wide troubleshooting
- The ability to scale up to 10 times in IP addresses and end points at cloud scale, and support over a million containers per rack.
- Unique cloud services with adaptive capacity and congestion control, allowing customers to support lossless traffic for IP storage, hyper-converged and converged infrastructure on a single unified fabric that enables application completion times 50% faster than traditional competitive platforms.
- Future-proofing with cloud economics for the transition to hyper-converged infrastructure and applications based on microservices and containers
Automation with Cisco Nexus Fabric Manager
The new Cisco Nexus Fabric Manager automates the complete fabric lifecycle management with a simple point-and-click web interface, and offers automated configuration snapshots and rollbacks. Nexus Fabric Manager builds and self-manages a VXLAN-based fabric, dynamically configuring switches based on simplified user-based actions. An IT manager can fully deploy a VXLAN-based fabric in just three steps, complete with zero touch provisioning, and can upgrade all fabric switches to a new software release in only four mouse clicks.
Cloud Services at Cloud Scale with Cloud Economics
Cisco’s hardware and software innovations will help IT organisations to accelerate the adoption of the hybrid cloud environments that will fulfill their business needs today and into the future.
- Cloud Scale: 1/10/25/40/50/100Gbps speeds, up to 10 times the number of IP addresses and end points, plus support for one million containers per rack
- Cloud Services: hyper-converged infrastructure, real-time telemetry, intelligent buffers for lossless traffic, 50% higher application completion times, plus visibility of every packet, every flow, every speed
- Cloud Economics: Investment protection and future-proofing with 25Gbps at the price of 10Gbps and 100Gbps at the price of 40Gbps
