The hybrid cloud trend is real and it's happening fast. IDC predicts by 2021, over 90% of enterprises worldwide will rely on a mix of on-premises/dedicated private clouds, several public clouds, and legacy platforms to meet their infrastructure needs. And by 2023, half of enterprise applications will be deployed in a containerized hybrid cloud environment to provide agility, delivering a frictionless deployment and management experience.

The events we've lived through in 2020 where armies of remote workers suddenly came online, and digital services were the primary interface between companies and their customers have accelerated the hybrid cloud journey for many organizations. This has also highlighted the value of a sound strategy and solution architecture that includes modern, on-premises infrastructure that is agile, intelligent, and future proof.

Enabling business outcomes

The Cisco HyperFlex strategy is based on three key concepts, each designed to help bridge the gaps between the capabilities of your IT organization and the needs of the business to thrive in an always-on digital world.

First, we believe IT teams need to adopt a cloud operations platform, such as Cisco Intersight, to enable a portfolio of services that deliver intelligent visualization, optimization, and orchestration for applications and infrastructure across the entire hybrid cloud environment. Cisco Intersight provides IT a single control point to consistently automate across highly distributed infrastructure resources while maintaining real-time visibility and insights on the relationship between applications and infrastructure that impacts performance and costs.

Second, IT organizations need the capability to deliver any app, at any location, at any scale, predictably and securely. This starts with modern, on-premises infrastructure that enables IT to deliver cloud-like agility so the business can quickly deliver applications and provide differentiated digital services to customers.

Third, adopt a scalable and adaptable infrastructure that allows IT infrastructure teams to build private clouds that can adjust to ever-changing business needs. This allows Cisco's customers the ability to address both modern data center and emerging edge use cases by scaling in any dimension to satisfy application requirements.

To support these business outcomes and to expand HyperFlex's hybrid cloud use cases, Cisco continues to evolve the HyperFlex portfolio with advancements such as:

More customer choice with software-only HyperFlex

Cisco has always believed in giving customers choice and flexibility and we have engineered HyperFlex to support a broad, open ecosystem across Cisco and our technology partners. Today, HyperFlex offers a seamless experience by tightly integrating hardware and software into a HyperFlex appliance to deliver the performance and scalability to power any application, anywhere.

Cisco is announcing that we will augment the HyperFlex portfolio by introducing a software-only version of HyperFlex that provides customers the flexibility to run Hyperflex software on existing and new Cisco UCS servers, third-party and white box servers that include ruggedized from factors, and eventually in the public cloud, enabling a consistent experience across the data center, edge, and cloud. Cisco will extend its "Cisco Validated" program that will test and validate Cisco HyperFlex on third party servers, giving customers the flexibility to pick server platforms of their choice, while providing Cisco certified solutions that customers can adopt with confidence.

We will continue offering and expanding our appliance offerings, but this augmentation with Software-only capability broadens the choice and flexibility for our customers. We are targeting next calendar year for the delivery of this software-only version that will enable Cisco to offer one of the most comprehensive hyperconverged infrastructure portfolios in the industry.

New Kubernetes, storage, and edge capabilities in upcoming HXDP 4.5 release

• Cloud Native applications:HyperFlex Application Platform and Intersight Kubernetes Service offers an integrated Kubernetes platform for production grade cloud native applications. This new platform simplifies the use of Kubernetes for IT and DevOps teams by curating open-source tooling, automating routine tasks, and providing full-stack lifecycle management.
• Container storage services:Deeper integration with Kubernetes Container Storage Interface (CSI) resulting in expanded storage capabilities for containerized applications.
• iSCSI support: Extends the HX Data Platform performance, storage efficiency and resiliency outside of the HX Cluster. Now, with support for iSCSI targets, any bare metal, virtualized or containerized applications, within or outside the cluster, can now use the HXDP storage features.
• New edge computing solutions:The HyperFlex Edge 240 and HyperFlex Edge 240 SD expand customers edge choices. The HX Edge 240 includes more disk and GPU support for use cases such as inferencing at the edge. The HX Edge 240 SD is a compact solution designed to fit in small spaces.
• Increased data protection and security:New built-in native replication capability, where multiple source clusters use a destination cluster to store replication copies. New secure boot and secure shell features ensure a trusted, more secure environment.

HyperFlex: modernizing the present, simplifying the future

HyperFlex continues to be instrumental in data center modernization initiatives and as the foundation of a modern hybrid cloud operation that spans on-prem private clouds, public cloud services, and edge computing environments. Our new HyperFlex capabilities are engineered to deliver automated, curated Kubernetes services to accelerate application development, deeper integration into containerized storage services, new edge solutions, and enhanced security.

We are proud to have been recognized as a leader in the 2020 Forrester Wave^TMfor hyperconverged infrastructure and look forward to continuing our mission of providing customers with the innovations they need to optimize their hybrid cloud environments. 

To learn more about Cisco HyperFlex visit: www.cisco.com/go/hyperflex