The Competitive Advantage for Cisco’s Hyperconverged Platform

Gartner analysts foresee that, within five years, hyperconverged infrastructure the tightly integrated union of compute, storage, networking, and virtualization capabilities – will enter the “mainstream.” HCIS will be the fastest-growing segment of the overall market for integrated systems, reaching almost $5 billion, which is 24 percent of the market, by 2019.

Cisco jumped into the red-hot hyperconvergence market last year with the industry’s first complete hyperconverged system for compute, storage, and networking. Hyperconverged Infrastructure and software defined infrastructure addresses a wide range of customer demands, because it combines innovative software defined storage and data services software, engineered on the Cisco UCS platform. It’s the proven system that unifies servers and networking like no other. Hyperflex is a combination of servers, networking, storage and related management in a packaged solution that is software-defined and virtualized.

Hyperconverged solutions differentiate from competing products by being faster from sale to production, relatively simple to manage and surprisingly flexible. The downside of Hyperflex is that it is basically a packaged data center. It’s good for new data centers, but isn’t a mix and match solution. When done right, the benefits from using hyperflex is that the components are designed to work together and the system comes together largely as a pre-defined and well-tested unit.

Features:

  • Complete Hyperconvergence: it unifies fabric network and computing technology in a next generation data platform
  • Flash optimised system: Gain high performance and storage longevity with a file system built for hyperconvergence
  • Flexible scaling: Scale nodes, computing, and capacity independently in Hyperflex clusters as needs change.
  • Continuous data optimisation: Increase capacity use while maintaining performance with data deduplication and compression

 

Cisco isn’t the only company that offers hypverconverged solutions, but the list is pretty short. Other companies are Lenovo, Dell Technologies and HPE. Each of these vendors have different levels of expertise. Cisco’s strongest component is networking, where the others also focus on servers and storage. Because Cisco has a significant stronger networking focus, this makes them stand-out. This appears to allow them to win far more effectively with desktop virtualization solutions where connectivity is favoured over processing power or storage performance. This includes implementations that use hosted apps, which do require higher performance as long as those apps are on traditional dedicated resources.