Cisco committed to closing the (hyper-converged) gap with the competition

If you’ve read the WhatMatrix SDS/HCI Landscape Q1 2017 report, you will have noticed that Cisco HyperFlex had to ‘up the game’ a bit throughout 2017 in order to rival some of the competition’s broad functionality and feature set.

If on the other hand you have not yet had a chance to check out the report, we can only encourage you to see yourself why almost 1,000 (!) other people have downloaded it to date.
You can still get your free copy here.

As for Cisco, they are working hard to catch up and have just released version 2.0 of the HyperFlex Data Platform software.

The most important new features the software introduces are:

Support for the all-new all-flash appliance models (HXAF220x M4 and HXAF240c M4).
Support for 40GbE UCS fabric networking.
Option to use volumes from existing traditional storage platforms as storage underneath HyperFlex. Fiber Channel (FC), Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), iSCSI and NFS are all supported.
Cisco has been able to ramp up its customer install base to more than 1,100 – business is booming!

Cisco HX 2.0 now available for comparison

However, some very important bits are yet to come in version 2.5 which should become available within a few months time. Think native remote replication, data-at-rest security using self-encrypting drives, support for NVIDIA Tesla M10 GPUs, public cloud integration and general availability for both the HTML5 interface and REST APIs.

Even without these features in place, Cisco has been able to ramp up its HyperFlex customer install base from 600 in October 2016 to more than 1,100 in March 2017. So business is booming.

If you’re interested in the specifics of all the new HX2.0 enhancements, please view our updated SDS/HCI comparison matrix by clicking here.

Herman Rutten – Category Consultant [SDS & HCI]

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