The partner ecosystem that Cisco HyperFlex is built upon is always evolving and adapting to bring value to our mutual customers.  When Cisco collaborates, great things happen.  In this episode of our blog series, we are excited to talk about three powerful recent additions to our suite of capabilities that are delivered in collaboration with AMD, Cohesity and Red Hat.

AMD EPYC processor based HyperFlex node options are now orderable

Back in March, we announced the addition of Cisco HyperFlex systems with 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors.  Now orderable, the availability of the AMD EPYC options expand customers' choice with hyperconverged systems that deliver outstanding cluster performance and efficiency for a diverse set of workloads.

These AMD EPYC processor-powered nodes offer a full range of compute vs. storage-optimized choices with the power to propel workloads including virtualized and hybrid-cloud environments, virtual desktop infrastructure, database management systems, and content delivery.

We are excited that when customers are able to choose this option, they gain the inherent advantages that these processors bring to hyperconverged workloads like compute density, high-performance and advanced security features like encrypted VMs within memory.  Cisco UCS servers have enjoyed record-breaking performance with AMD EPYC processors for the recent past and we are glad to have HyperFlex options now as well.

Cohesity strengthens HyperFlex's data protection across hybrid cloud

Cohesity has been an integral part of the HyperFlex suite of data protection options for years and our recent enhancements only strengthen and greatly add to the capabilities that HyperFlex Data Platform (HXDP) offers.

The HyperFlex integration with Cohesity builds on HyperFlex native snapshots to deliver data protection capabilities in the public cloud. This joint solution enables customers to unlock the true value of hybrid cloud.

Customers can use the agility and scale of the public cloud to rapidly provision and scale public cloud infrastructure for data protection use cases such as archiving data or replicating backup copies in the public cloud or using the public cloud as a disaster recovery site. This is an exciting extension to the core capabilities of HXDP.

There are powerful new use-cases that these enhancements bring, but just by illustration, here is one:

'Failover/Failback between HyperFlex/VMware and AWS'

In this case, a HyperFlex native snapshot backs up the VM on Cohesity on-premises cluster and replicates the backup copies to a Cohesity cluster on AWS.  In a disaster recovery event, you would initiate a failover to AWS which would convert the backup copies to EC2 instances.  Once the conversion is complete, you can use the EC2 instance as a production server, backup the EC2 instance using Cohesity cloud edition, replicate the data back to the original or new Cohesity cluster and failback to on-premise HyperFlex Cluster.  The joint Cisco-Cohesity solution provides a new level of simplicity, efficiency and TCO savings with data mobility and protection for HyperFlex node clusters.

Red Hat OpenShift and HyperFlex CSI integration is here!

Cisco, Red Hat, and IBM have long-standing collaborations with a shared common goal of providing an enterprise-ready infrastructure to their customers.  We are delighted to announce the integration of HyperFlex CSI (Container Storage Interface) with Red Hat OpenShift.

As more workloads get containerized, providing enterprise ready persistent storage, automated provisioning and data protection becomes a huge challenge.  Traditional methods of providing an application environment that addresses security concerns do not scale well with a rapid development and deployment environment, increasing security risks.  Enter, Red Hat...

Red Hat OpenShift is a full featured, enterprise ready foundation for building and scaling containerized applications for on-premises and public cloud workloads. Based on Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift enables businesses to transition to cloud-native deployments, where applications and microservices are all containers, communicating with each other in a distributed manner across a variety of systems.

These containers can be deployed to your private cloud in the datacenter, the public cloud hosted by a cloud provider, or a mixture of both as a hybrid cloud implementation.  Cisco HyperFlex offers its own CSI plugin, allowing containers to request, provision and utilize storage volumes stored within the HyperFlex distributed filesystem via the iSCSI protocol. This additional integration allows a Red Hat OpenShift deployment on top of Cisco HyperFlex to be truly self-reliant, requiring no storage resources from any other external systems.  With this new integration, customer can expect:

• Simplified Operationssuch as one-click deployment with the help of HX-CSI Operator and dynamic provisioning or pre-provisioning of persistent storage for containers
• High Reliabilitybuilt on the resiliency and high availability of the HX scale-out architecture
• Security Enhanced Containerswhere all HX-CSI container images are scanned for vulnerabilities and built on hardened UBI-8 image from Red Hat

For additional information about these new solutions from our key partners, please consult:

• Cisco's AMD landing site
• Cisco's Validated Design for HyperFlex with Red Hat OpenShift
• Cisco HyperFlex + Cohesity CVD (coming soon!)