Cisco just announced HyperFlex, a hyper-converged appliance based on its partnership with Springpath, a software-based hyper-converged infrastructure startup company. HyperFlex is the name Cisco gave to their Springpath hyperconverged appliances. These appliances are built on Cisco UCS servers with Springpath HCI software.
These appliances come with all the basic features we have come to expect in the Hyperconverged industry like: data reduction, local replication, and support for vSphere. Other hypervisors are planned in future, as are bare metal and additional embedded features. Integrated Management and Data Services allow HyperFlex systems to deliver native data services like granular Snapshots and Clones and to be seamlessly added to the robust UCS management ecosystem to simplify management. Right now they can only scale to 3-8 nodes, but there is nothing in the architecture preventing a lot more nodes being supported in a system. Hyperflex also claims to have independent scaling of compute and storage capacity allows right resources to be added incrementally in the right ratios.
They will offer two nodes initially. The HX220c is is the low cost model in 1U. HX240c is the capacity node, with up to 21 drive slots for HDDs in 2U.
The HX220c node configuration includes:
• 1 x 120-GB SSD drive for storing data platform logs
• 1 x 480-GB SSD drive to support the data platform caching layer
• 2 FlexFlash SD cards used as boot drives
• Up to 6 x 1.2-TB 10,000-rpm SAS drives to support the data platform capacity layer
• 1 Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Card (VIC) 1227
• VMware vSphere ESXi 6.0 software preinstalled (ESXi 5.5 is also supported but is not preinstalled)
• Cisco UCS service profile templates for automated cluster configuration
The HX240c node configuration includes:
• 1 x 120-GB internal SSD for storing data platform logs
• 1 x 1.6-TB SSD drive to support the data platform caching layer
• 2 FlexFlash SD cards for boot drives and the hypervisor
• Up to 23 x 1.2-TB 10,000-rpm SASdrives to support the data platform capacity layer
• 1 Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Card (VIC) 1227
• VMware vSphere ESXi 6.0 software preinstalled (ESXi 5.5 is also supported but is not preinstalled)
• Cisco UCS service profile templates for automated cluster configuration
It will be interesting to see how this deal impacts Cisco’s relationship with EMC and SimpliVity. I will be taking a closer competitive look in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.