HyperFlex Is the latest hyper-converged offering to come to the market and it comes by the way of Cisco and a startup called Springpath. Hyperflex bundles the Springpath software on Cisco UCS C series rack mount servers with an option to add B200 M4 for additional compute capacity. Springpath is a Silicon Valley-based hyper-converged software start-up that has been laying low for more than two years. Its key product is a hyper converged software solution called Springpath Data Platform based on their HALO (Hardware Agnostic Log-structured Object) architecture. This announcement is interesting because Cisco already has a long standing partnership with EMC, SimpliVity, and has been selling VSAN ready nodes who all compete in the hyper-converged space. HyperFlex is now the third option to the convoluted portfolio but Cisco looks like it will be positioning its partnership with VxRail as a first generation hyper-converged appliance.
HX 220c, based on three 1U, C220 servers that consume 3U space to make up the 3 nodes in the base offering. It scales to a total of eight nodes at 8U.
HX 240c, based on three 2U, C240 servers that consumes 6U space to make up the 3 nodes in the base offering. It scales to a total of eight nodes at 16U. The Cisco B200 blade server can be added for additional compute.
Here is a brief rundown of a high level comparison the two offerings:
Hopefully as more details arise we will be able to do a more technical comparison of the two offerings.
Hi,
a few thoughts about your list…
disclaimer- I work for EMC+Cisco partner…
1) For SDN – why couldn’t you do NSX on Hyperflex? I would assume you could say ACI as well.
2) why “none” for performance on Hyperflex?
3) Mgmt: VXrail manager?
4) VDPa is part of most vSphere licensed versions now
5) Scale is 8 nodes w/storage + 4 compute only nodes.
6) I might say hyperflex is 4 nodes in 10u counting FIs
regards,
Ian
Hey there Ian,
1) NSX comes with VxRail as a packaged bundle with everything else and is supposed to be integrated in the same VxRail Manager GUI in a later release. You could deffinately leverage NSX on HyperFlex but it would be an add-on and has no integration with UCS.
2) I have not seen any published performance numbers for hyperflex. If you have I would love to take a look at them.
3) VxRail has a GUI that tries to integrate all the different pieces together and simplify management when you scale. It is called VxRail Manager. It sits on top of vcenter.
4) VDPA does come with most licenses now but if you are looking to leverage a different hypervisor in the future, you will need to look to the hypervisor to support its own backup. There’s nothing natively unique to hyperflex for backup.
5) That is a great point. I was looking more at nodes with storage. This summers update will give VxRail the ability to present storage as an iscsi lun to external servers. So you could have some physical servers leveraging ones that reside on a VxRail cluster. So there is no need for compute only notes if you can use any server (except maybe for management).
6) excellent point