Digital Technology Inc - Cisco MultCloud

The premise of multi-cloud is simple: rather than commit to a single cloud service provider (CSP) or hardware vendor, use whatever works for the occasion. A multi-cloud organization may have a dozen SaaS, IaaS and PaaS services distributed across its teams and various departments, none of them related or cobbled into any kind of order.

While this may seem like a nightmare for CISOs and CTOs, the truth is that multi-cloud was always inevitable, and erupted into the enterprise spontaneously as project heads and software engineers took it upon themselves to adopt cloud when leaders were failing to do so.

Multi-Cloud: The Hottest Game in IT

Given its history, what reason could convince organizations to adopt multi-cloud as a formal strategy? There are actually many good ones:

  • Avoid vendor lock in – traditional cloud architecture involves choosing a cloud service provider (CSP) or – in the case of private cloud – hardware vendor, and this causes headaches when a company wants to switch. Multi-cloud permits seamless flexibility.
  • Best-of-breed – no provider specializes in everything, and some CSPs are superior for different applications. A multi-cloud strategy allows companies to pick the best every time, and this is the same reason many choose a multi-vendor IT strategy.
  • Data Sovereignty – organizations are often bound by law or contract to store certain information in a specific jurisdiction. Multi-cloud enables this level of fine-grained storage control without sacrificing the versatility of cloud.
  • Superior security – it might seem that multiple, compartmentalized cloud services would pose a security risk. While this is true in some ways (as we will soon discuss), multi-cloud protects against DDoS and other attacks by distributing eggs among many different baskets.

In fact, the merits of multi-cloud are so persuasive that it’s no longer the province of rogue employees, but the hottest strategy in IT. In 2017, IDC predicted that 85% of enterprises would adopt a multi-cloud portfolio by 2018 – and so far, those numbers have been accurate.

Challenges for Multi-Cloud Adoption

In spite of the benefits, adopting a multi-cloud strategy is not without challenges or risks. In the first place, governing a multi-cloud ecosystem is a complex task which can leave organizations with security risks.

When new cloud platforms are brought into an organization from the outside, they constitute a form of “shadow IT” – hidden infrastructure that lacks scrutiny or oversight, and cannot be held to high standards for compliance.

In the second place, organizations who wish to pursue multi-cloud as a strategy are often left confused. The CSP market is vast; determining what to invest in and how to use it becomes a significant struggle.

So, what’s the solution?

Multi-Cloud Governance with Cisco’s MultiCloud

In November of 2017, Cisco announced the MultiCloud Portfolio, an addition to its lineup of cloud services specifically designed to help organizations plan and deploy viable multi-cloud architecture.

To describe it in a sentence, MultiCloud Portfolio channels the chaos of multi-cloud into an organized framework that can be centrally monitored and governed. The product helps across several key areas:

  • Strategy – Cloud Advisory helps companies to research different cloud options and create a roadmap of the best investments for maximum benefits.
  • Governance – with Cloud Connect, organizations can create a single WAN fabric to unify clouds and extend private networks. It also permits the creation of network, security and app policies extending across clouds
  • Security – Cloud Protect allows admins to enforce compliance, secure sensitive data, protect direct-to-cloud connectivity and configure authentication for user access across laptops and mobile devices
  • Operations – Cloud Consume enables the easy deployment of containers and applications across a multi-cloud environment, and user behavior analysis.

Last year, Cisco also released MultiCloud hyperflex, providing the same multi-cloud features with a hyperconverged layer. With Hyperflex, organizations can configure and deploy virtual server environments, native and containerized apps across cloud providers.

This is an exciting time for the cloud industry: adoption has never been higher, and the tools that make it all possible have never been better. In particular, the state of multi-cloud represents a gold standard for IT infrastructure which has never been more affordable.

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Hyperflex - cisco support

HyperFlex systems provide you the performance you need

If your organization is like most, databases like Microsoft SQL Server are used throughout your operation. Maybe you rely on these databases for online transaction processing (OLTP), data warehousing, or batch processing. Perhaps you use business intelligence, online analytical processing (OLAP), or report generation tools. Most likely, you use a mix of these systems. Whatever the workloads, your databases need to perform if they are going to be able to keep your applications fed with data.

Cisco HyperFlex™ systems are a great platform for Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and SAP databases. Our all-flash configurations allow you to run your database and applications on one platform and get predictable performance every time. Read the case study on how CorpFlex used HyperFlex to deployed Microsoft and Oracle databases and ERP applications, reducing their storage footprint and TCO.

A distributed architecture for faster results

It starts with the HyperFlex Data Platform where all of the storage devices are combined into a single distributed, multitier, object-based data store that allows all cluster resources to participate in I/O responsiveness. Data is dynamically distributed across the data store and, as you scale the cluster, every new and existing component contributes processing power and storage capacity.

We designed the data platform around a log-structured file system that uses a caching layer to accelerate read requests and write responses.

  • Fast writes: Incoming data is striped across the number of nodes that you define to meet your data availability requirements. When data is added or updated, the log-structured approach simply appends a new block and updates the metadata, requiring little use of the server’s processors.
  • Fast responses: When data is moved from cache to disk, the data is deduplicated and compressed. This process occurs after the write operation is acknowledged, so there is no performance penalty for these operations.
  • Fast reads: The most frequently used data is stored in the caching layer to accelerate read operations.

 

Faster I/O for faster results

Let’s take a look at networking in Cisco HyperFlex systems. Why? Because your databases and applications need massive amounts of east-west traffic bandwidth and low latency. With integrated fabric interconnects, you get high-bandwidth, low-latency unified fabric connectivity that carries all production IP traffic, hyperconvergence-layer traffic, and management traffic over a single set of cables. Every connection in the cluster is treated as its own microsegment, with the same level of security as if it were supported with a separate physical link, making the integrated network more secure.

Consistent network performance

The system is designed so that all traffic, even from different blade server chassis, reaches any other node in the cluster with only a single network hop. No other vendor can achieve this result because they build switching into the blade chassis—switching that adds latency. Our latency is deterministic, so you get consistent network performance for the data platform, and you don’t have to worry about network constraints on workload placement. This single-hop architecture accelerates east-west traffic so that the cluster—and your databases and applications—perform better.

High data availability

The system stripes and replicates data across nodes based on policies that you set to meet your data availability requirements. You can even replicate data to local or remote clusters for backup or disaster-recovery purposes. How reliable is it? In the unlikely event of a failure, systems configured with five nodes or more can keep running even if all drives fail on two nodes simultaneously. And, the cluster can nurse itself back to health. In the event of a drive or node failure, lost data is regenerated using the redundancy mechanisms built into the system. When complete, the system can sustain further failures. That’s a deployment you can count on.

Proven results

Our distributed architecture allows every virtual machine (VM) to use the storage I/O operations per second (IOPS) and the capacity of the entire cluster, regardless of the physical location of the VM. Why does this matter? Microsoft SQL Server VMs frequently need higher performance to handle bursts of application or user activity. When VMs can access all of the resources in the cluster, performance skyrockets.

The Enterprise Strategy Group tested HyperFlex hybrid and all-flash systems using HCIBench, a tool that tests the performance of hyperconverged clusters. Baselining and iterative testing results showed that HyperFlex hybrid systems provides:

  • 3x higher VM density
  • 3x reduction in read/write latency
  • 7:1 reduction in IOPS variability

We didn’t just handle more I/O. We handled it faster. While the other platforms delivered average response times ranging from 6.61 ms to 44.45 ms, HyperFlex responded in 2.46 ms. You can read the full report here.

Get started with HyperFlex

On top of all that, HyperFlex systems are easy to deploy, manage, and scale. With our HyperFlex sizing tools, you can determine which configuration is the right starting point of your workload. You can also take the risk and guesswork out of deployment with our Cisco® Validated Design guide for deploying Microsoft SQL Server Database on Cisco HyperFlex all-flash systems.

IT support for data center operations

HyperFlex Multicloud Platform is ready for any app, on any cloud, at any scale

HyperFlex Multicloud Platform is built on 3.0 HX Data Platform innovations, introducing Microsoft Hyper-V support, container support, increased cluster scale with logical availability zones, and stretch clusters for high availability. HyperFlex Multicloud Services enable any application tier to be deployed, monitored and managed anywhere.

 

Stop by the HyperFlex Café at the Data Center booth and get a Demo Latte. Talk to our technical team for in-depth demos of the new capabilities and mark your calendar for the HyperFlex sessions described below.

 

 

 

HyperFlex Sessions at Cisco Live Barcelona:

Deep dive into multicloud innovations with Cisco HyperFlex

Speaker: Aniket Patankar, Senior Product Manager, Cisco

Discover the new HyperFlex HX 3.0 Data Platform features including mulitcloud services, Microsoft Hyper-V support, advanced data protection capabilities, container support, and increased scale. Learn how this new platform’s innovations extend operational simplicity to any application, on any cloud, at any scale.

Tuesday, Jan 30, 04:45 p.m. – 06:15 p.m. |  Register

Enabling A Multicloud World

Speakers: Liz Centoni, SVP/GM Computing Systems, Cisco & Kip Compton, Vice President, Cisco

Learn Cisco’s cloud strategy, how Cisco and our partners can help customers address complexity across a multicloud environment, and how HyperFlex is ready to deploy all your apps in a multicloud environment.

Wednesday, Jan 31, 12:20 p.m. – 01:00 p.m. | More details

The next Cisco HyperFlex release goes multicloud ready

Speaker: Darren Williams, EMEAR HyperFlex Leader, Cisco

Covering new features of the HyperFlex Multicloud Platform including Hyper-V support, logical availability zones, stretch clusters, HyperFlex Container Appliance, and increased scale. In addition, a panel of customers will share how they are using HyperFlex today.

Wednesday, Jan 31, 01:15 p.m. – 02:15 p.m | Register

 

We’ve just highlighted a few, additional Cisco HyperFlex sessions are available here.

Not going to Barcelona? Don’t despair. You can still catch up on HyperFlex’s new capabilities by attending our TechWise TV webinar: Accelerating Multicloud IT with the New Cisco HyperFlex  on February 28th.

But if you’re going don’t wait, register for these sessions now and visit us at the Data Center booth where you’ll also be able to catch 10 min deep-dive sessions on HyperFlex in our Education Zone Mini theater.

See you in Barcelona – Hasta pronto en Barcelona

@FrancoiseBRees